to my beloved princess moon,
i have been a lunatic, composing songs and verses to a moon which i can only see and admire when the sun has slept. it is almost a guilty pleasure, a sin, because admiring you in the dark forces one to hide from the light and do it in secret. as all the great loves should be. and so i have been staring at the moon, as all lunatics do, in the dark, in secret, when and where nobody else is watching.
i sent my songs and verses to the sky for you to read and listen to. i sang them as hard as i could so that it will reach the empty and silent sky. My verses had to be resilient to survive the immensity of the silent space that separates the earth and the sky. I had to wound myself and bleed into my words so that they will have enough passion and strength to reach your ears up in the heavens.
my verses traveled far. they almost lost their drive and their meaning. your throne was too far for my mortal verses and melodies to reach. but they persisted. i bled enough for it to reach your heights. and finally, you heard them. and you wept.
i never knew why you wept. i never found out whether you were moved by my rhetoric or by my words and music. the distance that separates us was too wide i can only imagine the reasons. i imagine that you were moved by the hopelessness of the metaphors and the longing in the rhyme. i imagine that you wept because you too wanted to close the distance. that you wanted to leave your throne in the sky and be with the maker of these verses...but your place is in the sky, and the laws of the universe forbid you to come down and be with a mortal poet. but you see, it is my imagination that kept me composing...because deep inside of me, i know that the true reason for your weeping would be more painful to me than to you. i will never dare find out. i will settle with the reasons i have created in my imagination.
and then, a sliver of moonlight kissed my cheeks and whispered to me the real reason of your weeping. and true enough, it was more painful to me than to you. it was more tragic than i can ever imagine.
the sliver of light told me your secret. you were wounded by my song and verses. not by its hopeless longing for your light but because it told you that i was admiring an imagined princess of the moon--a princess moon that i have created inside my head. my songs told you a tale of tragic love--that i never longed for the real moon, the real princess, that i only loved an image of you that i have fashioned through my craft.
the half light came to me in the middle of the night and confessed to me your secret love. she told me that you fell in love with my verses and my words. they wounded you, and you fell in love with them. not with its maker but with the reflection of the maker they had within them. you fell in love with the poem and not the poet...
my verses betrayed me. my songs, despite the blood i shed into them, lost its melodies in the vast distance of the heavens. They have lost their true meaning. They have failed. They only brought you an echo of my dreams and my longing. their meaning faded into the dark silent space...
and they stole you...they stole your heart so i can never find it...
so i write again. as a vain attempt to regain the meaning of my words.
it was our tragedy. i have admired your light from a dark distant place. i have sung about your beauty. my songs betrayed me. tristan claimed isolde and never brought her home to his king.
and so this is the farewell.
a farewell not to the princess moon i have loved but to the poems i have crafted to woo you for me. I sing farewell to the poems who clouded the moon from my sight. i must move on, i must walk on, far, far away. I must leave and find a darker, farther place. I must hide in a more secret secluded shade and find a view of the moon that is not curtained by the clouds.
I must find the real princess moon.
So she can find the poet who created her secret love.
and maybe, she can shine on that dark, secret shade even for a moment...
and the poet shall write again...
-mar
prince of the dark woods
