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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Month of the Hungry Moon

I am going from the dark desert
of my moon,
the white open flower of my dream.
I am going with the silver emptiness
of my eyes,
to see,
to be warm,
to feel the flight of my vacuumless wings,
to reach the end of the infinite wall,
to touch the beginnings of eternal dust.

I want to see time measured by clocks,
hear an hour pass in the silence of sleep.
I need this to be true,
to be more than a ghost,
a fog.
I need the dimensions of the world
inside me like a sea,
like an ocean full of dawn and light,
swallowing the sun,
raising the stars.

I need this in the month of my hungry moon,
the pain of my birth,
the pain of my dying.
If you ask why I care,
I’m a different species
that lives without questions,
that lives in the recesses
and the ceiling of the air.
I am an Indian’s child,
the son of a machinist,
offspring of words.

I have lived and died every day of my life,
I have taken nothing for granted.
I have been given color and light,
and perfume,
and fear,
felt the love of a tree,
conversed with the emptiness of a glass.
To know,
to know,
and in the end they have told me,
be still and you will know,
and be friend
to a blade of grass.

Published inIndex of all Poems