Patrick Draven

Huntsman's Moon

A soloist played by a street lamp in a shadowed corner’s usual haunt away from genteel passerby where only lost souls walk. Silhouetted like a living eclipse again against the sanguine moon, the bright stands in the exile of darkness.

Man and moon stand in two solitudes and he stands before its vexing light like an uncertain king on eve of battle before an eyeless sibyl prophetess confiding his dream like an offering to the night. 

The Moon.

Detached patron to dreams but confidante to dreamers, of kings and shepherds while flocks and armies stray. Like one on a cooling walk that takes pause in his pre-occupation at the solace of a hauntingly beautiful performance by a street harpist he likewise ceased in his step before one who captures his heart in silence set to music.

But restored faith in dream stepped in like a guardian angel taking one under the wing like the dark-winged angelic, driving away a hovering chickenhawk poised to strike as if an old shaman in answer to a new “prophet” who has held an isolated nomad tribe in thrall while he withers away to emaciation in untended isolation. He rises and steps in to face the illusionist a final time. He shrugs off the hands that tell him he should remain in hermitage and rest and speak confession.”I have nothing to confess, only that I believed”.

He sighed before the moon-lit road to the horizon over the sea, despair and wounded courage to its tone like a Celtic chieftain’s ghost haunting a kingdom built over brave warriors' bones. The interplay of moonlight over the waves like a mosaic’s tiles shattered and re-assembled by a sleepless artist in the sky till it seemed that masterpiece took form and face. As if sculptor,painter, and composer collaborated on a work of art that embodied all art- forms in inspiration and there stood one as ever swelled and broke a heart.

And his dreams would never be the same again...The sense of wonder rejuvenated for he had not believed in angels since ten when word came he would not see his father from the war again. The moon-lit glow enlustred the ebb-tides as if a goldsmith applied his craft to a multi-faceted flow of precious gems and by that angelic radiance he so beheld her. His muse.