Moon 21

With your vanishing
I am forced in darkness
to remember that
emergency caesarean
the doctors and nurses
expected because
that night the moon was full.

Half of us labouring
felt you pull the waters
out of us, though that was
the extent of it.
Left to our own muscular
miseries,we were not exactly
over the moon.

While you skated free
on that great rink in the sky
we froze, our infants
panicking, the signals
akin to alien landings
the anaesthetic, the scalpel:
our newborns wrapped

like astronauts in
tin foil blankets.
"Once in a blue moon ..."
the nurses assured us.
Three years later I gathered
facts and forgave myself,
those medicos, and you.