My lover, my moon, my muse inspires me with her passion for our love. Her empathy and ability to connect deeply with me, has made me feel like she is the architect of a safe space inside myself for creativity. It’s seems as if every quiet moment now brings ideas to my mind – some joyful, some dark, but all of them feel like they were waiting for me to sit down with a pen and listen.
While sitting outside recently, I was looking through old photos I took of the Dachau concentration camp and thinking about the people who died there. I thought about how their potential lives of passion, love and discovery were taken from them by the dark vein of evil that curses humanity. In my lifetime, it seems like we have never so energetically mined this vein than now.
Above me, helicopters shuttled wealthy movers-and-shakers back and forth between their downtown penthouses and the airport. I found myself hoping, for those ambitious mountain-movers, that they had lives filled with love. I hoped that they would not one day come to find that they had condemned themselves to a life of forced labor on things that would leave them lonely and soulfully unknown.
I’m not comparing the fate of those lives lost in Dachau to the lives of pleasure amongst the elite, but it’s in the juxtaposition of those lives that the idea for this poem began. Once started, a poem takes on a life of its own and any resemblance to its genesis can get edited out.
In writing this poem, I’m also reminded of how frequently I use the inexhaustible symbolism of water in my poems. I’m not alone is this, of course.
His Moon, Her Ocean 