Shadows cast by moonlight don’t quite seem so dark now;
I suppose she too wonders what it is we lost.
Even the scratching branches of dead trees
look alive in the pale light of mourning.
The oxymoron isn’t lost, she keeps looking down, Mona Lisa smile
on the craters that line the rim of her lips.

I wonder if she knows of the holes in our hearts,
the tears in our souls, if her light doesn’t come down in rays
but in stitches, the healing power of a drifting love.
Can she feel the weight of our lives from so far away?
Does she listen to the prayers said in vain?
Dead syllables floating up like feathers,
broken syntax of the voices cut with pain.

Listen to the glisten of the frost in her coldest nights,
sometimes your name comes whispering through the mist,
fearless, furtive, affirmative in scope and in scale.
Yet there is something I have still to do,
as the moon continues her journey through the heart of the dark.
I must let you go.
I must lose you.

After wondering, I’m sure she knows exactly what she lost,
maybe that’s why she smiles, to hide just how much it hurts.
She might have holes in her heart,
she might have had her soul torn apart,
but if she speaks, her words get lost in the distance,
that awful distance that time itself cannot overcome.
Maybe I should be grateful I cannot hear her cry.

She sinks away, and her light is snuffed out by the dark,
without whimper, without fear, a little sparkle in her eye.
She knows and so do we, she will rise again,
but a little part of her will be lost, swallowed by shadow,
but eventually time will repair her and make her whole once more.
I think that’s why she’s there,
why she always smiles.
She shows us we can survive, if we really want to.
Light and dark, it comes and goes, but the dark is necessary
to appreciate the true beauty of the light.

That is why she’s there.
That is her beautiful gift.