January 2025
Bio Note: A retired magazine editor, I live in Arlington, Virginia, with my husband and cat. The antique desk where I write overlooks telephone wires and maple trees. My poems have appeared widely and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. My publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, and The Unknowable Mystery of Other People.
Lunar Lullaby
Oh little sister in the sky,
formed of the same cosmic cloud
of debris, circling big brother,
pulling the tides, waxing and
waning.
Oh faithful follower,
teller of time, ruler of seasons,
mirror of Earth’s light.
Shine down on our dreams
and soothe our sleep.
You who washed a walking fish
ashore to evolve into a different
being, help us grow into wiser
and kinder beings.
Oh symbol of Goddess Artemis,
destination of Apollo missions,
tell us a bedtime story.
Tell us the why the Man in the Moon
is mourning, why the craters are crying,
but tell us it all ends well.
Close to Nothingness
… and the dust returns to the ground
it came from – Ecclesiastes 12:7
Everything trends toward formlessness, decay.
I think of the birds who gave up their feathers,
no doubt unwillingly, for my grandmother’s
duster.
Their bodies, long stilled from flight,
have themselves dwindled into dust.
Once they flew a seemingly limitless sky,
an avian infinity.
Now, mere dust, they are close to nothingness.
But not nothing.
Years ago millions died from nuclear fallout
borne aloft by dust.
Today, dust from the far-off Gobi Desert settles
on Greenland’s ice sheet and hastens melting.
What is dust, after all, but an accumulation
of the past.
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