Vision Neath A Harvest Moon

He was a man who grew up from a child,
Who grew up in the countryside.
Saw five thousand years in overlapping tides,
Some waves tame and others wild,
Stone to bronze to iron, then all to steel did yield.
Each tide marked out in path and field,
The unwinding of the years all clear to see,
Himself the center of the landscape's gravity.

So, since the land and he were one,
He'd venture out at night without a care,
In sure and certain knowledge of what would be there,
When he sat by moon-bright pool, or in a hilltop dun.
No flutter from a thicket unexpected,
Every nook and cranny he'd inspected,
'Til even silent, ghostly owls oer'head,
Could not send him running home to bed.

And thus it was, one Autumn night in a favorite place,
A yew grove, one tree grown out in perfect round,
In a shadowed deer-wood he'd long since found,
He thought he saw, or waking dreamed, a face.
A figure pale and slim, and moonbeam crowned,
Come from underworld or forgotten fairy mound,
And sitting there he continued to stare, nor blinked -
Lovely, she stared back a while, then winked.

Like the icy shock of a deep, dark pool in Summer's heat,
That apparition. His heart racing and ringing ears,
Between one breath and the next she disappeared,
And leaping up, like a hart before the flames he made his retreat,
Mind whirling, had she been illusion?
And what was this sudden sense of purpose, of choosing?
In waking dream he fled back home to bed,
Visions of his future racing through his head.

These days we find the man little wiser and fully grown,
A long ways away from that wood and ancestral home,
In desert watered by tears of fossil bone,
Alien, slowly learning the stories of local stone,
And yet he keeps on trying, now witch and priest,
To honor her at every Sabbat feast.
Still dancing to that endless, oldest, tune,
And remembering, every time he sees the Harvest Moon.