When evening lifts the silver from the sky,
The moon ascends where waking voices cease.
It gathers all the fragments left by day,
And clothes the restless earth in borrowed peace.
When evening crowns the silence with the moon,
I lift my eyes where only dreamers climb.
One ancient face keeps watch above the world,
Unmoved by grief, yet softened still by time.
Some call it only stone suspended high,
A lantern drifting within the endless blue.
Yet every tide, each whispered midnight prayer,
Returns my quiet thoughts again to you.
Keeper of oceans, memory, and light,
Guardian of all the words we leave unsaid,
You cradle hopes too fragile still for dawn,
And weave them gently where the stars are spread.
Perhaps that is why hearts still seek your glow,
Long after daylight claims the waking land.
You ask for nothing, yet you faithfully
Receive each longing placed within your hand.
I spoke to it as one speaks into distance,
Believing silence was the only reply.
Yet something moved too slow to name as signal,
Too sure to be denied by the eye.
It answered not with voice but with returning,
The tide rose higher than it had been before,
As though the moon gathers what the world cannot hold,
All breath too heavy, all silence without form,
And carries it softly until it turns to light
And leaves the world both emptied and restored.
Some say the moon is nothing more than stone,
A lantern lost within the endless blue.
I know another face that greets the night,
And every rising carries me back to you.
