Phantom Moon

by Roekaerts

Roekaerts was born in 1979 and graduated from UCL with a degree in French and German.She started writing poetry in 2020 after a series of personal tragedies befell her. Her poetry is all autobiographical, and she seeks to examine the nature of pain and to destigmatize it. She argues that the social impulse to distance ourselves from negative feelings is in fact harmful to our emotional health, and that distress is an integral part of the human condition. A selection of her poetry, some of which is performed, can be found on Instagram @grief_and_loss

Phantom Moon

When vicious sadness lances

Spears that disembowel,

My soul on which pain dances

Emits a silent howl.

But the moon to which I cry now

Has no substance, warmth or healing,

A mere reflection of my feeling

Caught in a water bowl

It’s beauty empty and unmoving

It’s all just for show

Casts back my own deep longing

With a light itself belonging

To a sun you’ll never know.

---

Lost at Sea

Oh how I wish I wasn’t me

But a glorious master of the sea,

Whose sails have caught a steady wind

but I've dropped anchor for I have sinned.

Judgment soon will be cast

Much longer here I may not last,

As sky and sea start to encroach

Clouds build and gather dark in dark reproach.

I turn my gaze at human kind

So much to love in them I find.

Deftly around the rocks they steer

Helping the ones that stray too near.

As do the souls that pass me by,

they fear my death and so they try,

They do not know, they cannot see

The anchor’s lodged in the soul of me.

---

Come Armageddon

Come Armageddon, only she will survive,

Crawl through destruction, though limbless, alive.

Civilization now crumbling to dust,

Detritus that slices, so deeply unjust,

treacherous terrain bears the anger and hate

Of society's true nature the dead did create.

And on her arrival no pain does she feel,

Immune to her wounds, for the flesh ones will heal,

But full is her heart of despair without end.

She heaves herself upright her message to send

And yells down the crater to whom she knows not,

"Come on, mother fucker, is that all you've got?"