The Red Haze of Moon

The Red Haze of Moon


A red haze sweeps across the moon.
The girl’s eyes swallow the disc in wonder,
and she leads her grandmother out, crayons
in hand, from the belly of the warm cabin,
into night, their feet slapping gravel
amid the buzzing of cicadas, their shadows in tune

against the moonlit path. The grandmother whistles her tune
of the man who forgot his pants on the moon;
the girl laughs herself raw against the gravel.
The grandmother smiles down at her wonder,
this red-haired girl who lights up her cabin
with bins of cicadas and towers of crayons.

The girl races ahead to the beach, a trail of crayons
behind her. The grandmother scoops them up, the tune
now whistling of a girl, who, along the journey from her cabin,
forgot her crayons in her haste to meet the moon.
It’s redness reminds the grandmother of another wonder
who in his haste to make the light, met the gravel

and red. The girl waves the grandmother from the gravel
onto beach, and nestles into sand, crayons
behind both ears, eyes on that red-disced wonder.
Eyes closed, the grandmother sighs in tune
to water lapping stone while crayons trace the moon.
The buzzing of cicadas envelop the cabin;

the beeping of a thousand monitors in a cabin
of a room washed white by pale faces, the gravel
of lead sinking inside her, while outside, the moon
murmured red shadows. The girl’s crayon
drawings could not cheer death out of tune,
and the cicadas watched as they buried the wonder.

The grandmother worries if the girl will ever wonder,
one night deep in the belly of their cabin,
why she could not stop the tune
of men in black shoveling gravel,
with those same crayons
which now capture the red-disced moon.

The grandmother’s wonder stills the gravel,
as they return to the cabin, cicadas and crayons
trailing behind them in tune with the red haze of moon.