A Blood Moon Blanket

Related Stories of Trauma

Somewhere there was a Blood Moon, but here the eclipse was after sunrise, after the moon had already dipped below the horizon. I was disappointed. The internet was another reminder of the ocean between where I live and where I left.

There should be a word for the specific emotion one feels about choosing to leave one’s homeland. An amplified sense of estrangement, of loss, of isolation.

Ambivalence without regret—but I will always miss shared experiences like language. Like eclipses.

A Blood Moon isn’t rare. They appear a few times a decade. But we’re supposed to take notice of these events two or three times in a decade, or in a century. Most of us don’t even know why, exactly: what do we take away from the experiences; what do they teach us to give?

It should be something. Right?

But is it more significant that watching a high tide ebbing in the evening? Familiarity overshadows significance all too often.

As a species, we are compelled to witness. We pass on stories, or we make related stories discrete from our true experience, or we unravel the essence of stories into historical cultural facts on a Wikipedia page.

I’m curious about the relationships among experiencing, witnessing, and telling stories.

I have a vague memory of being grabbed by the arm and told to watch the television set, while I was toddling unsteadily focused on a cookie, or wanting a cookie, or something equally sensually stimulating. I remember being told something important was happening. I swear I remember the light reflecting off the television’s glass surface. I remember the angle of my view. But it isn’t like I witnessed the moon landing.

Saying so would be a fact and a lie.

I know someone who had a goal to take their children to all seven continents before they were seven years old. But a claim to bragging rights isn’t the same as experience. And what is experience, if it doesn’t weave itself into the spiritual fabric we wear as we move through the world? Does our unconscious experience shape us?

I’ve been thinking about all the conscious experiences that have taken years, taken decades to teach me something: that false compassion might need to give way to anger before I can hold an honest and healthy understanding of the past. I know rage is an animal that needs to be embraced before it can be let go. No matter the wounds it causes. Thinking about the Blood Moon, I believe the unconscious experiences are sometimes the good that gets us through: our life’s blood beneath the shadows.

When I was 15, I had to have a molar pulled. It had decayed beyond repair. I cried. For 9 years I’d lost so much of my childhood self to abuse, that this self-neglect felt particularly keen. I was ruined by this. I still believed in a God who pulled strings, and I felt that I’d been through some kind of test and failed. I’d been given something pure to protect and been distracted. I can still feel the texture of the soggy, wounded bit of gum on the tip of my tongue. I can taste the sharp clove, the gauze, and the blood.

Years later, a chunk of my cervix went. Years after that, the sensory organ of a breast. Were these somehow my doing—or three sisters with scissors? The Norns, the Moirae, the Fates, depending on your cultural perspective.

We are clipped one thin strand at a time.

How many feathers can you clip before you ground a dove?

A dove is just a white pigeon. Its elevated stature is the epitome of arbitrary delineation. Our drive to draw circles around random aspects of our world and allocate value, still astounds me. A dove is a symbol of love, sex, war, peace, or the spirit. It all depends on your cultural perspective. Outside my window, I often see wood pigeons and mourning doves, but never white doves.

Windows are like mirrors. Looking out becomes looking in. I know that after all the years I avoided the view by closing the blinds in my tomb-like apartments, or welcomed it, watching the crows jostle for position with the pigeons on the neighbor’s roof, against the impossibly blue sky, beneath a pink-etched cloud. A vapor trail.

I am a bird squatting on a rooftop in March’s chill.

Do they really grow back once you’ve clipped them? The feathers?

This week, the x-ray technician will press my foot to the cold plate and take an image. The doctor will decide if I can walk again. If the bones in my toe have grown together, after the chiseling and the scraping. If the metal plate and the screws have done their job.

This body isn’t a jaguar that can swallow the moon. It isn’t a dog, a sow, or a soft toad on the running trail. It is a hybrid of slings, and stents, and screws. It walks because humans strip the bark from yew trees for chemotherapy drugs, because they eviscerate the earth and make oils, and metals, and plastics.

I mourn the passing of this Blood Moon. I feel my loss, because from this perspective, from this landscape so far from my toddling, my arm-grabbing, “look at this” home, I’m reaching for something to blanket all the exposed hurts. A bit of superstition, a bedtime story.

Goodnight Moon. The jaguar, the sow, the dog and the toad will surely devour you again. You will survive them. Yet I fear for you.

I look up now and apologize in advance for our footprints, our defiled planet’s relics, and for what’s coming.

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Thank you for taking the time to read or listen.

I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments on Substack, or go to the Dramatic Roots chat, where note sharing becomes an act of literary citizenship. Post a link to your work, and share another. You can find more about my work, including my mentoring and accountability services, at renpowell.com.

I’ll be back next week with a new poem.

Warmly,
Ren

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