moonlight

Quote for Today: Emily Arden

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As soon as the torch went out the atmosphere of the forest intensified. As her eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness she started to notice the outlines of canopies above them where trees were silhouetted against the pale moonlight.
The sounds around them became more noticeable; the shuffling of an animal through the undergrowth, the whistling of the wind through the trees, and now and then the cry of some creature being captured in the darkness.
As they sat quietly, the noises seemed to become louder still until both visitors felt absorbed into the forest world.
—Emily Arden, Lie to me: Deception: Book Two

Quote for Today: Michael Shea

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The wind that night made him feel his chronic longing. The wind, trying to stampede the trees, was roaring for a grand, universal departure to another solar system, a better deal, and the grass struggled to join the rootless giant of the air. All that lives strives to fly, to master time. All tribes of beings strain to rise in insurrection, all knowing their time is short, all, when the wind blows, wanting to climb aboard.
―Michael Shea, “The Growlimb”, Best New Horror 16
Image: Slope Point  © Ben with CCLicense

Quote for Today: Harold Monro

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Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:

It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond
Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond
Stares. And you sing, you sing.

 

That star-enchanted song falls through the air
From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,
Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;
And all the night you sing.

 

My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee
As all night long I listen, and my brain
Receives your song, then loses it again
In moonlight on the lawn.

 

Now is your voice a marble high and white,
Then like a mist on fields of paradise,
Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,
Then breaks, and it is dawn.

 

―Harold Monro, Collected Poems

Quote for Today: Mary Stewart

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Skogsøy Moonlight (Norway) @ Yosh3000 with CCLicense

Skogsøy Moonlight (Norway)
@ Yosh3000 with CCLicense

Sometimes, when you’re deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don’t carry a distaff. They’re not Fates, or anything terrible; they don’t affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grown on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest.

―Mary Stewart, The Moonspinners

Quote for Today: Ishmael Beah

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Lewis Spence, illustration from Myths of Mexico and Peru, 1913

Lewis Spence, illustration from Myths of Mexico and Peru, 1913

“We must strive to be like the moon.” An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often… the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines.
―Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Quote for Today: W.B. Yeats

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The Cat and the Moon 

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

―W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole 
Public Domain Image via Pixabay