MOON AT NOON

What is the Moon doing in the noonday sky?
Doesn't it know that it is day and the kingdom of the Sun?
Has that old traveler gone astray
and clumsily entangled himself in the clouds?
Has he fallen behind or hastened?
He is pale as the trace of a dream 
that the noise of morning has not yet broken.

He is white as the white bird of memory
that hovers like a ghost above human heads.
Is he perhaps a memory of a vanished friendship?
Or a picture of antiquities covered with the cobwebs of time?
Perhaps a shadow of his own light
when it is not the light of his own shadow?

Are men only shadows of their own light,
only shadows of their glorious image?