October Creative Writing Ink Poetry Winner

Moth

Elizabeth Godwin

Flashing over polished stones,
our candles bobbed 
like plums in cold water

and glanced across the foxgloves
and cow parsleyscenes we had breasted
in the tang of that late summer afternoon’s high smoulder.

Lured on by lamps piercing the dark, 
a theatre of our cheekbones and foreheads
we made our way across the shingle to lay

sugared offerings and wait
to see the moth of its kind the last.

Splendid of underwing and crimson burning eye it had clung
to this half mile of deserted strand
surviving storm,heat  breaking wave
changing air encroaching sea and crumbling land.

So it fed 
and we watched
its wings, breathe in and out

as if in ecstasy
its proboscis plunging the flowing rags
of treacle and rum

sucking like an opium addict 
the sticky manna we had made.
Thus surfeited, 

in the juddering beam of its scarlet eye
but with broken wing 
it flashed from the clutch of earth

to simply vanish
and leave, 
as if to chide us for being late comers.

Now only air, dark water and fading land 
hollow eyed and parchment skinned 
marks the empty road back home.

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