Solstice Moon Setting

Karla Linn Merrifield

Early this morning,

I was bedazzled

by December’s full moon.

Suspended solo,

without suiting stars,

between the shallow breasts

of snow clouds,

it swung slowly

against the black skin of sky.

Now the day is overcast but,

having watched it,

a polished silver pendant

shining even as it set

into the waiting

bare limbs of trees,

I’m content

to go unadorned

through winter.

Karla Linn Merrifield is a Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence. Her poetry has appeared in CALYX, Earth’s Daughters, Poetica, The Kerf, Negative Capability, Paper Street, Blueline, The Centrifugal Eye, Terrain.org, Elsewhere: A Journal of the Literature of Place, and Elegant Thorn Review, and in several anthologies. In 2006, she edited THE DIRE ELEGIES: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America, from FootHills Publishing; in 2007, FootHills issued her Godwit:  Poems of Canada and this fall will bring out her chapbook Etowah River Psalms. She is poetry editor of Sea Stories (www.seastories.org) and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com). She teaches writing at Writers & Books in Rochester, New York.

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