Seagull Muses Moon

Seagull Muses Moon

Full Moon  February 24, 2024

I think of gravity and bones

When I see the joggers scud along the mud flats

Peopled with non-human selves poking protein from silt

How the grebes and cormorants seem to gulp

Before diving out of sight to fly underwater.

I wonder how long this wind will blow

with its pure hoarse voice

& if all that crying has been reciprocated.

Does the planet’s wobble serve as stimming

To soothe the needs of creatures

Who go about swimming through the air

Or sailing underwater instead of taking time in stride

One footfall after another?

Is it our purpose to make a mirror-game of life:

Hold my grandfather in youth long after his death

So that I can say Elder & know myself entrained in grief.

How can the buffleheads preen so casually

In the gale of this climate vortex?

Or, rather, what invocation of what ideal

Doesn’t lose its foliage to the storm?

As there is the compound reflection of the moon

I am drawn to the hold of the earth on a wet morning

A ground squirrel’s portal, occupied by burrowing owl

A soothing lure for my imagination:

The hole that opens to an infinite interior

Reservoir of unnamed fertility.

Poem by Qayyum Johnson

Painting by Suiko Betsy McCall. We Hold Many Sacred Centers, 2023. Ink on Yupo, 26×20″. Original in a private collection. Prints available at suiko.art.