Eclipse of the Moon by Mary Susanah Robbins - HTML preview

Orpheus and Eurydice

A sudden silence. I would write to you

but the birds are circling: that promises rain

and other auguries I am too pressed to know. Again

silence. The birds fly from my mouth, and I

who wept last night for Orpheus, cannot cry

my own sunrise in glory and in dew.

There is eternal love; thus Hermes said.

I remember, pressed against the loam

of a far hill, and frightened to go home,

my shattered thoughts focused upon one thought,

‘I will remember you,’ and so you brought

my body and my soul back from the dead.

How long we are betrayed! The living string

that plays on memory keeps silence now

although I pause to hear. I think on how

you could have found me after all this time

and know I found you, and that in this rhyme

is all you are: I looked back, and I sing.

The following poems, with some changes, have appeared in these publications:

The Beloit Poetry Journal, “Seattle”

Outerbridge, ‘Sometimes I hardly know which one of us I am.’; ‘I want today to talk to you of work –’; “Spring, the Present”

The Lyric, “Exile,” ‘Life Comes Flying’

Sojourner, “Men”; “Eclipse of the Moon”

Salome, “Song”

The Other End of the Couch, ‘Feeling is touching, Knowledge, thoughts, and dreams’

The World Guild Poetry Magazine, “Moving”; “Morning”

The Hudson River Review, “Breaking Up”

Mati, “Train of Thought”; “The Uselessness of the Common of Garden Variety of Experience”

Phoebus, ‘light and dark alone are waste.’

Poetry from Sojourner, “Eclipse of the Moon”

Ploughshares, “here”

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