Prayer Against The Devil Moon (For N.C.) Poem by Matthew Buchwald

And now his grim sigh of mortality,
Of endless droughts, erratic wanderings,
Muslin shrouded and enfeebled where
The crescentic pitted scowl Earthward looms,
Whining out blown proscriptions of our grief;

O save this desert, whose dissonance tolls
On steles of leaden withered axioms,
The crosiered torpor of whose councils ends,
As lunar caprices token green or rank,
All but the perfidy of traitors' minds,

And westward, as shocks in Loma Prieta
Insult the dulse quietude of the sea,
In those seaweed shallows of the skies,
Caesura of shores, where the dwindled Archfiend,
Annuls the false light of his perjured lips,

Heed how his adumbral face wanes till black
And retreat while his unseen bile
Incites putrefaction of wind and sand,
Retreat, while they are hot, - war, famine, disease
Filling ten craters and ten grimy channels,

Salve us by fear, O antic stars, and wit,
O flaming vagabonds of cosmic dust,
Deliver us from the lunar stress till
Appears at the nexus of our eclipse
The occultation of the moon by god.