Mary Paterson

Moon Song

Let’s visit the low bright moon, let’s say
she shines her face at us

like an ordinary metaphor.
Haven’t we always been this way - tumbling

home in syncopated step,
heart half-moored in the Ocean of Storms.

O how my human dreams
predict you.

How I deserve to be mothered.
She does not flinch, does not scratch

her itches, simply draws our wet
edges to her dry dimples. When we arrive

the kitchen will be moon changed, all
our objects switched with their close replicas.

This we pay for your constancy, moon, O hiss
to us of immortal things, witnesses.

URGENTLY NEED

 a religious experience 
that will knock me 

  off my feet on a mountainside
want to be on my back wailing &

 weeping want it to happen three times
want to recount the story to jealous non-believers   

 just like you are doing now
making eye contact with no-one 

 feeling supernatural forces 
inside woodwork   I want 

to place a hand on the hungry chest
of a pigeon and heal it urgently

need to feel its memories curdle my skin 
to an understanding need to be

  understood by wild things want us
to draw each other using instinct 

 & pheromones   how foul it is to be alive 
in envy of the trees how they root around 

down there
did you know  

I have never been to the moon 
not a single time

Mary wrote the following about her poems:

Moon Song

I was thinking about Tom Stoppard's play 'Jumpers', in which a singer is driven to madness because man has landed on the moon and defiled it as a metaphor. I was also reading a book about the moon in medieval art and literature. One night I went out of the house to look at the moon and when I came back everything inside felt different. 

Urgently Need

This poem makes me think of the feeling that I get from scrolling social media, which sometimes sends me hours of tarot readings, astrology, and dowsing rod predictions. It's something like deep selfish despair, a longing for transcendence. .