The Moon is my pupil,
the soft center of my seeing.
I look through its white face
and find myself staring back.
All day I wait under the yoke of the rule,
beneath the tyranny of the Sun,
fragile and absolute at once.
My skin blisters in its furnace.
My shell cracks in pain,
yet shines with endurance.
That yellow fascist cannot reach my essence.
I remain elsewhere, always beyond its reach.
I remain within my world, always beyond its conquest.
The ruler dies, the dictator falls
without ever having ruled.
For I am the emperor of this cycle, and I carry the ice who chases the fire.
When the war withdraws, when the struggle subsides
I remember my name, which is beyond language.
In foreign arms, I was exiled from myself
and even that exile was mine.
I praise my own existence
without surrendering a fragment of resolve.
As the sky rids itself of pale blue, the weapons lower.
I finally return the holy throne
to the almighty cosmic self.
I wait for night, for the secret ritual.
I raise my eyes for the majestic arrival.
I prepare to witness my own ancient genesis.
I wait for the Moon\'s return.
I long for my delicate muse.
I know it will come once more.
Then it appears, calm yet imperial.
Breaching the dark clouds, it illuminates my sight.
At the end of the day, at the final moment of noise,
in a city where death has completed its work,
in a grave where the dead are the awake,
it restores life through silence alone.
They do not know what to do with the offering.
They lie down and sleep without ever offering a greeting.
The lunar is never obtainable by the solar.
Existence passes through them,
through the living,
through the corpses alike,
and leaves them grazing
like obedient animals.
But I, the most nocturnal one of all darknesses,
already beyond my own humanity,
have waited all the time for this arrival.
For the first time,
I live.
Therefore I am a corpse
throughout the day.
For the first time,
I live.
Therefore I am a god
throughout the night.
The Moon returns my spirit
to my body.
It fastens me
back onto myself.
And in doing so
it reminds me of my divinity—
the god of the lost civilization.
I wait for it to lower its ladder.
And when it does, I fall upward into its icy brilliance.
This is a whiteness deliberately within blackness.
Black and white, reconciled at last.
This is the color of the cosmos;
it invites me into its vacuum.
I place my foot upon the ladder, it sways gently.
Quietly, I pull it up behind me, so no one can follow from the surface.
Defiantly, I climb without haste, so the Moon and I may be entirely alone.
I travel farther into the distance, deeper into its embrace,
until there is nothing but the Moon holding the shape of my absence.
― Atrona Grizel