The Red Sox were winning, and the Blood Moon, the Hunter’s Moon, was beginning, and I was at my daughter’s watching both, quietly slipping inside and out every fifteen minutes or, catching the best parts of each.
This Lunar Eclipse was the first I can remember watching alone, standing alone under the oaks, among the stillness, under a sky that cleared just in time for the show to begin. Everyone else on that dead-end street in western Massachusetts was inside rooting for the Red Sox. And so for those few crisp, clear moments, it was just me and the moon.
And so it began, preserved by the lens of my cheap little digital camera.
And just as it was ending, a magical red apple offered by an unseen hand reaching out of the black star-embellished sky, the Red Sox won.
What my camera couldn’t catch was the face of that dark, bloody moon. The woman in the moon, the the moon-shaped face on the statue of Acua’ba that watches from the top shelf of my bookcase. Acua’ba, who seeds the seas and guides the night; who guides the seas and seeds the night.
I was in for the win, but then I went back outside to finish what the moon had begun.
Three times widdershins around the house, sending dark into dark, weaving points of cool starlight through the trickles of warm homeglow, spinning the emerging moonspurs into bright wishes, hopes, healing.
Banish Bush, I chant. Heal the wounds. Protect the sons. Moon Mother. Keep all of our sons safe and all of our daughters strong.
Begin the change. Open the hearts.
ADDENDUM: I wrote this twenty or so years ago. I still feel the same way, especially as I wait for elections to be over.
The flocks are forming to the north,
flying in the face
of a hungry hunter