Moonlight
We went out at midnight on the coastal road
to gather moonlight years ago
on a school night.
I remember how in the deep silence
it bounced off the glimmering autumn tarmac
snaking away like a bubbling silver river,
flowered in glittering dark waves
rolling towards us far below, broke
open on the cracked granite cliffs,
danced on the fingers of thousands
of wet fern leaves shimmering
the black undergrowth
like fairy lace
past the bronze age burial chamber
once full of sleeping kings,
seeped invisibly into the lighted rims
of our open pickle jars.
We screwed the lids
on tight, wrapped the cold glass
inside warm coats, dared not look
back as we stole silently away.
Once home, we lined
our bedroom windowsills
with glinting rows of captured moonbeams,
used them to heal our illnesses,
to seal our wounds.
Lucy Whitehead writes haiku and free verse. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Broken Spine Artist Collective, Burning House Press, Clover and White Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, Collective Unrest, Cypress, Electric Moon Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, Ghost City Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Mookychick Magazine, 3 Moon Magazine, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Parentheses Journal, Pink Plastic House, Pussy Magic, Re-side, and Twist in Time Literary Magazine and in numerous international haiku journals and anthologies. You can find her on Twitter @blueirispoetry.