Winter Moon

Trees bare at the edge of the ridge,
scraggly, December, full of secrets.
Cold Moon rises, barely there among branches.
She shocks me!
“Come out of your house!,” She challenges me.
“Breathe my bare cold.
Clean and direct I’ll fill your lungs.
Come out of your comfortable house.
I want you now!”
With that slap from the big Cold Moon
I’m made to remember.
The white pull of Her glow tugs hard
at some treasure I’ve been hiding.
Gazing into the white-glazed night forest
I pause for the Moon to paint me, too,
with cool Winter’s light.
For Her, I am what I am, nothing more.
The days go and go and go,
bright and noisy as ever,
but within me, as in dreams,
She demands my attention,
tripping me up,
no matter how well I hide.

Annelinde Metzner
December 21, 1995

My home in Phoenix Cove where this poem was written

Run toward your creative life

Cabin window at Hawkscry

Run toward your creative life with all your might
even when, and even because, tears stain the very surface,
the fiber of your creative being.

Isn’t this your truest self?
Isn’t this a pristine beach,
more wild than winter, more vast?

Doesn’t the joy breath of your inner life
smell fresher than new-washed cottons hung in the air?

When the long day finally ends,
and I come close to the inner self,
I pull back the veil.


Annelinde Metzner      
June 2006

Lagoon at the Baba Center

Pine cones

Piano at Wildacres

Sand dune at Ocracoke

Clouds across Ocracoke

Swiftly, darkly moving,
nothing impeding,
clouds move dramatically over Ocracoke,
beautiful spit of an island
‘way out here, twenty four miles out to sea.
These clouds move, they move darkly,
grey and white,
powerful and overwhelming over the little village.
The clapboard houses and flooded streets
are quiet, quiet
as the clouds move as they will.
I feel our farawayness, our immersion,
I feel the clouds moving over the vast sea,
over Ocracoke, over me,
we a village of beings unnoticed
by the clouds,
darkly, swiftly moving.

Annelinde Metzner
November 28, 2014


Ocracoke is the most southern of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, reachable only by ferry.