Moon Bathing

Here is a beautiful poem by Claire Dewey. Claire felt inspired to write this after reading Philip’s ‘ A Brief History of Nakedness’. Claire writes, ‘It is just a simple response to waking up and feeling an urge to go naked in the back garden!’ Enjoy!

Moon Bathing

I rise – a negative of myself,

Float, intense with dreamer’s stealth,

Cross moth grey grass, feel dew baste the slipper of my naked soles.

 

The steeple and the chapel blink in the moonlight

Shaping the silence of the lost town. Slumbering stone rises

Over ragged waves of suburban hedges strewn with summer.

Skin is a new tissue of cool, colourless delight.

My body, a wafer of pale ghosted flesh, alert, tight,

Unwrapped, balanced on the night, a delicate precision of secrecy,

Pressed like a petal between the dawn and predawn sky.

 

The intensity of dark yields sculptural shapes, shrubs, fallen trellis.

Unseen birds rest velvet throats in tree dark, deep magnificence.

All is rich- ripe. A tall darkness of thick towering shadows eclipse me.

About me, upon me, within me, the pitch and pull of naked night.

 

Buds and blossom loll and nod – a staggering sweetness –

Drunk and reeling on the plumes of their own sharp scent.

In wavering shadow my stark newness startles with a simple joy.

The sleeping garden sighs, rolls over, receives me.

Claire Dewey