The Moon Does Not Pray Back

The moon wears your ruin like jewelry.

It has seen the wet red of you,

the way you gnaw at your own shadow

just to feel full.

It hangs above, unblinking,

a wound polished to holiness.

Not god,

but the echo of one,

still bleeding light centuries after the body is gone.

You stare up and think devotion is a kind of worship.

It isn’t.

It’s hunger refined.

And the moon knows hunger better than you.

Once, it too was devoured,

the sky bit through its throat

and left it circling in apology.

Now it watches the world like a lover who can’t forget the taste.

It doesn’t listen to your prayers.

It inventories them.

Every whisper catalogued in the dust.

Every wish salted and stored.

You call that reflection.

It calls that remembering.

When you speak to it,

your words arrive as light delayed,

centuries too late to matter,

but still warm enough to scar.

And if it ever answers,

you won’t hear a voice,

only the small surrender of tides,

the hush of something vast bending close enough

to taste your disbelief.

The moon does not save.

It collects.

The faces you shed.

The names you buried.

The half-made versions of yourself

that still howl through your sleep.

And when you look up,

all that brightness you worship

is only what you’ve already lost,

burning, beautifully,

in orbit.