Serious Moonlight

The sky we deserved looked down on us at midnight 

In the ink-dark town, in its black basements,
Where the parting hours cowered in doorways
With their small dashed hopes like cheap stars
Glistening on the dirty ground.

There were other stars, white stones in heaven,
Sharp bones of light so far away and small;
These, the wheeling braille of blind gods turning
Some cosmic message, rough to their touch,
Unreadable in our fingers.

Like every drunk in the gutter, like every straggler in the street,
Every eyeball searching like a planet for the orbits of paradise,
It was emptiness called us out, bleakness inside the heart,
Deflation of the soul or our faces stripped of everything
But the lines those same hours, the daily grindstone hours
Scratched on the surfaces of our skin.

If there was cloud, it had left the evening behind for pity
And if there was weather, the last of it had dripped from roofs,
Scuttled away like vermin down gratings or, whipped by wind,
Risen upwards through the wires and sodium lamps
To chase the mists that followed the clouds’ retreating.

It might as well have been hell in the road-map maze,
In this pointless and useless tarmacadam wilderness;
Among the downcast faces few looked anywhere but down
And those that did look up saw judgment come upon them
From the rooftops like the flash of ordnance.

The callous moon was rising to its seat on night’s right hand,
With its moon-face, stern and unforgiving, piercing us all,
Solemn under a black cap of cloud, silently passing sentence
Upon the world, a revelation of cold scorn
And condemnation.

So hope was laid to rest in these broken roads then,
A few homilies uttered over its sentimental corpse
And, gone for good or bad, we sang, long live indifference.
The moon rose further in its estimation, colder still
Until a frost fell on the tiles and air pushed the rising mist
Back down to earth to remember once again its place.

No rooms here for love nor lovers in this moonlight,
This serious moonlight that seemed to roll the wheel of stars
To an unearthly beat and wove its path between the constellations
Like a dance. Ah, dance. Let us. If the monochrome of night
Would let us. Dance the blues.

In this strangled spectrum of reflection
There could be no sun and all our dancing shoes
Were fading, red to black.

© BH, 2017

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I was asked, what is this about? Because it's bleak and no mistake. Well, I replied, it’s about humanity and nature. I would say that wouldn't I? But, still, we humans may think we have dominion over the Earth. We disregard nature and do whatever we want. Because we can, it seems. We forget, as ever, that nature disregards us in return. Hence the moon’s cold judgment in the above. If we’ve made the mess down here, we can clear it up. Or we can suffer the consequences, as well we might.

Of course, there are hooks and references. I saw Bowie singing ‘Let’s Dance’ the other night (Top of the Pops, 1985 - don’t ask). I heard the chorus line ending ’in this serious moonlight’. I'd liked that phrase when I first heard it but I forgot it, of course. And lines like 'Let's dance / Put on your red shoes and dance the blues’. They crept in. One way or another. 

But it’s not all a Bowie-fest though I seem to have been on one for a while now. A couple of lines echo Tom McRae’s song 'Hidden Camera Show' which had  left behind a memory of drunks and gutters. In the song, though, the drunks sang ‘My Way’ and there was a hitman in the gutter. Off his first album I found in a junk shop in 1995.

The things that linger, eh?