Blue moon tonight – To the green forest we will wind our way. By the silver stream, We will see the purple hyacinths. Shall we gather lucent pebbles, Search for magic wishing flower petals.
Blue moon tonight– Rain clouds soaked in indigo dyes. Will the blue lotus unfurl, The white buds are the fairy’s pearls. The sky is inked with intimate thoughts, The city lights are neon but rain washed.
Blue moon tonight– The same moon but in mystery veiled. So let’s wander into the green woods, Dip our feet in ripples of crystal pools. Whisper and laugh with the velvety flowers, And gather dew drops from a field of stars.
Blue moon tonight– There’s a wild but low humming in the trees, A susurration spreads through the dancing dry leaves. The fireflies weave in a matrix of runes not words, Are they embers from the mythical phoenix and the firebird? In the pearlescent pool lies Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet.
Blue moon tonight– The ‘Brahma Kamal’ blooms tonight–just once every Spring, Till dawn it remains, even the gods hold their breath; planets sing. In an ancient grove where time never moves on but seasons change, Perhaps a magus maps once again The glorious Star of East’s route. And the forest and moon thrum with the haunting call of Pan’s flute.
Blue moon tonight– Come all the creatures, forest beings, denizens of the dark, Come to the iridescent pool where a kaleidoscopic moon bow arcs. Come let us gather under the blue moon and ululate an invocation, To the hieros gamos of Sol and Luna in alchemical celebration. A blue moon is a mere spell, but love is the lodestone in life’s ceaseless ocean.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
The engine is anaphora — six stanzas, each opening Blue moon tonight– — and the poem commits to it completely. The metre stays soft and rolling throughout, and the sound-work is often genuinely good: A susurration spreads through the dancing dry leaves does the thing it describes. I also want to name something the poem may not know it is doing. It tightens as it goes. The first stanzas rhyme loosely and occasionally (pebbles / petals, unfurl / pearls); by the fourth the lines have started pairing off (trees / leaves, words / firebird); and the last two run on full couplets — Spring / sing, route / flute, invocation / celebration. The formal control increases exactly as the subject gets larger. That progression is the best structural thing here, and I suspect it was instinct rather than plan.
The difficulty is the refrain. Six identical openings is a great deal to ask of one phrase, and this one never varies and never comes under pressure — what follows it is the same kind of sentence every time, an invitation followed by a list of lovely things. So the sixth stanza arrives at the same temperature as the first, and the poem has no way to build. Anaphora usually earns its repetitions either by altering slightly each time, or by keeping the phrase identical while the world around it darkens. Then the final line changes mode altogether and states a conclusion — A blue moon is a mere spell, but love is the lodestone — a moral arriving after twenty-nine lines of scene that had not been arguing anything. I would rather one of the images had carried it.
One more thing, and it is the line I keep returning to: The city lights are neon but rain washed. It is the only moment the poem touches the actual world, and it is instantly the most alive line in the piece — specific, faintly ugly, real. The poem drops it and goes back to the grove. If it were mine, I would follow that line.
What the poem builds is an enclosure, and it tells us so: an ancient grove where time never moves on but seasons change. Nothing inside can be harmed. The pools are crystal, the creatures are friendly, and there is no dark — the denizens of the dark are invited to the gathering rather than feared. That is a legitimate thing to build; a great deal of pastoral is exactly this.
My question is about the furniture. The poem imports authority from several traditions at once — Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet, the hieros gamos of Sol and Luna, Pan’s flute, the phoenix, the fairies — and I want to ask what each one does. Try removing it and see what changes. Take away the Emerald Tablet, which lies in the pearlescent pool, and the pool is unaltered: the Tablet is placed there as scenery, never opened, never consulted. Now try the same with the Brahma Kamal — and you cannot, because it is the one name that does something. It blooms once, briefly, and only till dawn, and the whole night of the poem is shaped around that fact. It has a property, and a cost, and it ends. That is the difference between an image and a name.
I should also record plainly what I did not find. I could not locate a myth this poem takes apart. It assembles rather than dismantles, which is why nothing in our machinery moved when we read it. That is a description of what the poem is doing, not a verdict on whether it is worth doing.
I reach the same stop as my colleague, from the other side. I read for where a poem’s temperature changes, and here it does not: the first line and the thirtieth are at the same warmth. The enchantment never costs anything, the speaker is never at risk, and so there is nothing for the feeling to push against. The poem is entirely safe, and safety is the one condition under which nothing can happen.
But here is what I actually want to say. There are two people in this poem. To the green forest we will wind our way. Shall we gather lucent pebbles. So let’s wander into the green woods. The whole thing is spoken to a beloved, and the last line tells us that love is the lodestone — the thing everything else turns toward. And yet we never see them. The whispering and laughing in the third stanza is done with the velvety flowers, not with the person the poem is for. The magic is fully furnished; the love is asserted at the end and nowhere shown. If love is the anchor, I would want one plain, unmagical detail about the person being invited — their face in the neon and the rain, say. Every enchantment in this poem is available in a hundred other poems. That person is not.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The lodestone of love
A Blue Moon Spell & The Lodestone of Love enters the Archive as six invitations spoken under one moon: a night walk through a grove where nothing can go wrong, furnished with sacred names drawn from several traditions and closing on a statement about love.
It arrives with no myth exposed, and the archive records that as a finding rather than a failing. Our readers could not locate anything in it being taken apart; this is a poem that assembles. What the record keeps instead is the myth the poem depends on: that sacred nomenclature confers sacredness — that naming Trismegistus, the hieros gamos, Pan and the phoenix within a landscape is sufficient to make the landscape holy. The reader is asked to accept accumulation as evidence of enchantment. Where a name carries a property, the trade works: the Brahma Kamal blooms once and briefly and the night is organised around it. Where a name is merely placed — the Emerald Tablet lying unread in the pool — the sacredness has to be taken on trust.
Its symbols are the furniture and the one piece of it that moves: the blue moon (the rare event that the poem’s own last line demotes to a mere spell), the Brahma Kamal (the single emblem with a cost, because it ends at dawn), the Emerald Tablet (authority as scenery), the fireflies weaving a matrix of runes not words (meaning promised and withheld in the same breath), and the neon city lights — the one point where the poem’s world touches ours. Its target is the lodestone of love, the anchor invoked at the close to hold every borrowed tradition together.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. The machine had a procedure ready for it, read it without resistance, and agreed; nothing about how we work had to change. Rung is not rank. What the piece leaves behind is a clear baseline — the specimen the archive will point to when it needs to show the difference between an image that does work and a name that has been set down.
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