New Moon by Diane Jackman

Diane Jackman's poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Outposts, Story (Happenstance Press) and many anthologies and magazines. Winner of Liverpool Poetry Festival, Deddington Festival and Norfolk Prize in Café Writers’ competition Other works include the libretto for "Pinocchio" for the Kings' Singers/LSO, seven children's books, translated into several languages, children’s stories and choral lyrics.

She has just completed Lessons from the Orchard, poems exploring her childhood on a farm in the English Midlands, and is now working on water poems.

New Moon

Relieved I am not seeing it through glass

I turn my silver over in my hand

according to some half-remembered rite.

New moon or old, my money will not grow.

I do not care to hoard and cherish

but want it now, in a silver spoonful,

never ending bounty like the widow’s cruse.

Instead, it pours out in an ordained stream

of rates and taxes, heat and light and food.

Before the goal is reached, the stream runs dry.

Ten thousand or ten million pounds, the field

lies still beyond my grasp, under the moon.