Stars dance at the bottom of the back garden
where the rain waits in shallow ponds
for the earth to lick it dry.

Reflections are dependent on position-

you cannot catch the moon lying on the ground
from the front window where the sun lingered
a little longer today than the tear stained back
where stars tickle the empty earth we’d since weeded
while the moonlight’s absorbed by the shallows
never deep enough to hold the right answers
to the questions the imagination is too distracted
to decipher.

Breakable is dependent too on position and how we transition-

will the earth lick the stars from callous pond,
here, in the back garden while I sit trance-like,
in this window of the empty sky,
turning this piece of plastic over in my hands
to pacify panic, counting the intakes and holding…
one, two, three, four and then out… releasing
for a second longer like the sun that lingered earlier,
in the front, while I was out digging holes
in the earth at the back,

trying to get closer to the cure-

plunging pressured palms down into that hellish heat
to dry this pond of trapped starlight, allowing them
to rise again instead of dying out here,
on this empty earth.

There are times I want to quit this place, these concerns,
this kitchen, this garden, this land, this planet,
this moonlight and feel what it’s like to burn
through eternity and not just lay here,
waiting to be licked.

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly