All of Me

In a single hour
of August moonrise,
she steals all of me,
lured by her silver glow.
Time seems to stand still;
I bask in her light show,
and the deeper I dive,
succumb to her moonbow.

I can’t mourn the theft
of my inner soul;
moon, take all of me,
I’ll treasure what is left.
I stand in moonlight,
baptised, not bereft.
Unabashed, I know,
I stand naked in the afterglow.

Kim M. Russell, 8th August 2024

Image by Meca Jane Tabada on Unsplash

It’s Thursday and time to meet the bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, with Laura, our host, and an Octameter for August and Sara Teasdale.

Laura reminds us that we are in the eighth month and today is the birthday of the poet Sara Teasdale, who was born in 1884. She has shared an extract from Teasdale’s poem ‘August Moonrise’. She tells us that ‘love, life, beauty and death are the hallmarks of much of Teasdale’s poetry which is unsurprising given that she lived through wartime as a young woman’.  She also shares another extract, this time from a two-octet poem, ‘The Answer’.

Our challenge is to write an Octameter, designed by Shelley A. Cephas in 2007, which has sixteen lines – two stanzas of eight lines each – and five syllables per line. The rhyme scheme is a/b/c/d/e/d/f/d;  g/h/c/g/i/g/d/d. Laura says to watch out for those repeat rhymes and where they fall; 2 in the first stanza and 3 in the second stanza. There is no set theme but we may write in the style of Sara Teasdale or dedicate a poem to her, with or without epigraph.

It’s my birthday on Saturday, so I’ll stick with ‘August Moonrise’ and take inspiration and my title from these lines:

“Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.”

31 thoughts on “All of Me”

  2. I love your surrender here and those lines you chose from Teasdale’s poem. I love your line:

    I stand in moonlight,
    baptised,

    You turn your experience to embracing the sacred here ❤

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      1. You’re welcome, Kim. And oh yes, I can relate to that poeming difficulty with this year’s POPO. In other years I’ve done ekphrastic but this year have gone in with thought bubbles lol

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  11. Such an evocative poem in ‘octameter,’ Kim! You do a wonderful job, in my view, at finessing the strange circularity of the rhymes with the shuttling between the moon and your persona’s “inner soul”—that seems to be the form’s own potential.

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