Cycle

by Rebecca Fraser

In dreary bar in London's west

Business man seeks work day rest

He loosens tie and takes a seat

Overlooking cobbled street

Glancing up through cityscape

Full moon maintains an eerie shape

Young girl enters, tight and tanned

The suit removes his wedding band

Engages her with flattery

Buys her drink, then two, then three

Invites her back to hotel room

Two figures stir the backstreet gloom

Cheerless boudoir, grimy, damp

Yet moonlight shines, no need for lamp

Groping crudely, parts her thighs

The girl smiles back through lupine eyes

Love not made, instead lust sated

Man rises, ego validated

A stench of matted fur in air

He whirls to find the girl not there

Instead a crouching, snarling hound

That crosses room in canine bound

And rips the throat tie once adorned

To flee into the night, reborn.

Flashback four hundred years or more

When warships land on foreign shore

Between the light of setting sun

And darkness, where the moon's rays shone

Young soldier strays in twilit wander

His limbs to stretch, his soul to ponder

Ocean rhythm, saline breeze

Urge soldier on, until he sees

In distance filled with nighttime gloom

A lonely figure on shoreline loom

Shapely female silhouette

Gypsy skirt and hair of jet

Footsteps over crunching sand

Two strangers meet, she takes his hand

Pounding heart and light of head

He lays her where the waves still tread

Mouth on mouth and flesh on flesh

Yet overhead the clouds unmesh

Revealed against a starlit track

Full moon resplendent, white on black

Gentle fingers that once caressed

Now talons ripping heart from breast

Young soldier's blood seeps into sand

His battle lost…not by man's hand.

Now picture please, an ancient earth

Centuries 'fore the Carpenter's birth

Terrain much different, yet sky the same

Stars and moon in unchanged frame

Primordial tribes, a hunting man

Who worked the land to feed his clan

Went forth to stalk the nightly prey

The jungle danced its strange ballet

And through the dappled light he spied

A creature moving, gimlet-eyed

Not buffalo, or sloth, or deer

He closed the distance, raising spear

Silent footsteps, art of track

Bracing mind for swift attack

Moonlit clearing, void of game

The hunter looks for trail of same

Seeking signs on bended knees

A grizzled fiend streaks through the trees

Disembowels with swipe of claw

Extinguished life through unseen maw

So remember in this modern age

When lunar myths are deemed unsage

The cycle holds no man immune,

Where will you be next full moon?

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