Crescent moon with earthshine

    by Christine Klocek-Lim

The devastation was over.  She held

my son to her shoulder, catching

his head with her tears as he slept.

The moon’s crescent cradled itself

while I paced in the darkness

looking for earthquakes, but there

was only the earthshine lighting

the sky’s face.  My mother once said

she thought birth was the beginning

of all things.  Instead my son’s heart

defect taught her that pain stalks

the spirit, but I knew, even before

the surgeon opened and closed

his body, that joy can reach above

the world, sometimes reflecting

back from the moon, etching

a slender halo on the darkness.

© 2009 Christine Klocek-Lim

Christine Klocek-Lim’s poems have appeared in Nimrod, The Pedestal Magazine, Terrain.org and the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory.  She received the 2008 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry and was a finalist in Nimrod’s 2006 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.