Moon and Sphinx: An Eternal Observance
If, or what, I am guarding is forgotten
by people long gone,
spells of their old priests born by winds
to nevermore.
Now I'm left to wait nights for what is older than me,
kinder than the sun.
My meditations are troubled by the sun's burning eye,
though the ancients who built me pointed my face
to its dawn in worship.
The sun, these high pyramids, Grandeur
is a king brash and boastful. Mystery
is my queen, the moon of night, subtle and alluring,
she matches my mood perfectly.
Humans look at us and see such idols of silence
and obscurity, weave us into their mythologies.
They are nothing to us, we survive them all.
Over the eons we see only each other.
Even the stars sometimes burn out, fall
from their asterisms, but the moon
returns over me forever, never falls from the sky
only grows and shrinks.
It is the heartbeat of our so long witness.
Tonight, my stone-blind eyes see not the dhows
as they sail over her glittering train on the distant ribbon
of Nile.
They are nothing, their world of fleeting lives.
Only she and I are eternal.
And though she is ever above me, shaped by higher hands,
in my stone dream my mistress metaflowers, expands
in the sky as she descends to me.
Yeats, from an island of stone circles, should have known
stone cannot move itself, yet in my dream
I move my lion's foot as she settles down
between my carved paws – even as my sedimentary heart
knows this can never be.
Steven Croft's latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, 3rd Wednesday, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.