Werewolves

(A poem written in Glasgow during the solar eclipse of 20^th March 2015)

We ran together, you and I, 

as wolves and werewolves through the thickening dusk,

racing for two and a half delirious minutes,

twisting through vanishing twilit forests of hidden desire,

transformed to reveal our secret selves,

drunk with ecstasy and apocalypse,

drunk with the darkness of the eclipse, rioting,

giddy, swooning with the swift sudden reperfusion

of all the glorious unspent rage of ages past,

restored by the wider world's paralysis,
set free, gone wild.

The birds meekly surrender their songs to silence.

The deranged Sun rides the Moon along a course

plotted upon the surface of the Earth by helpless astronomers .

A few brief seconds are turned into an epoch, an age of wonder,

in which our howls are tribute, not to some Moon of myth, 

but one suddenly present and full with night during the brightest day,  

stealthily stashing the Sun’s stolen light on its dark side.

Her lead disc offers a single coin to reckon the whole world's worth:

Quoth the Moon, "why should I return your Sun to you?

The world it illuminates only excites your cupidity.

By its light your suspicious spy satellites peer over shoulders,

reading communiques or love letters from one hundred miles high.

Why should I readmit you to their orbit,

let alone allow you to trespass upon mine?

Your society is a crime committed in broad daylight:

isn't the cover of darkness more fitting for your conspiracies?"

Inexorable and punctilious physical law

punctually peels away the darkness She adores

from the highest mountain peaks to shingle shores

and the returning day is met, not with joy,

but by our own resignation and indifference once more,

as we return to our desks and our dull quotidian chores,

but we will run again as wolves and werewolves,

across the blazing caesium fields of Chernobyl

where we buried alive the angry fires we made

for a while at least,

across the glittering bismuth marsh of Pripyat,

drooling with the bitter potash filling our mouths and nostrils

leached from the ashes of this burned and bleached land

as all the world’s gold melts and sublimates to nothing

under an inevitable hot thermonuclear glare

and houses with walls made of feathers take flight,

startled by the bomb’s loud blast,

and the fireball brings the eclipse home to stay at last,

pulling the Sun out of the Earth,

its cloudy fist first clenched around it,

obscuring it like the Moon had done,

before opening its hand to blow the ashes from its palm,

releasing us to roam and bay forever at the Moon,

in the parched grey twilight woods of nuclear winter.