Goodnight Silver Piece of Moon
The garden turns towards the night
Lower your eyelids over the water Join the night like the trees you lie under How many crickets How many waves easy after easy on the one way shore There are stars from another view and a moon to draw the seaweed through No one calls the crickets vain in their time in their time No one will call you idle for dying with the sun
— “SONG TO MAKE ME STILL” by Leonard Cohen, from his 1961 collection The Spice Box of Earth.
Night falling slowly with the fading music of last light.
The daffodils like little oil lamps aflame in yellow cresting drifts across the grass, whilst deep-purple hellebores grow dark like drying blood and withdraw into twilight obscurity. Pale clouds of spun sugar hang in the fading sky—sky carved with branches bare and dark and silent. Song thrush sings generously lyrical and resolute beauty, black wings of crows here and there, butterflies gone: day’s finale before it is extinguished, before there is the stillness of the night. The beautiful goodbye.
The garden turns towards the night. The garden that is tended with absolute devotion, that has been loved for a lifetime, that has been always faithful—it is so fine at the slow close of the day; so perfect in its simplicity and its honesty.
Friendship of land is healing—the land that is unfettered and absolute in how it holds me, gentle and tough at once. I fall into the garden for a final embrace, wandering with bare feet over cold damp grass, tired arms around myself, calling out goodnight silver piece of moon, goodnight trees and soil and stones of my crackpot heart.
