Night, The Huntress Poem by C Richard Miles

Though the huntress, Night, can now no longer prowl,
Black as a nun, beneath her chilling, cold, cavernous cowl,
Like a pitch-dark panther padding, claws all sheathed,
Through our bright, unsleeping, lamp-lit city’s streets,
Out, far-out, in unremembered nooks, her rural haunts,
She still lurks hidden, waiting silent, poised to pounce.
Moonlight may mask awhile her terrors but, too soon,
She, like a scouting-party reconnoitring for the storm,
Creeps sinuously, extinguishing each faint, flickering star
Like candlelight snuffed out by blackout curtains of the war,
Casting her clouded cloak, fine filigree fingers of fleece
Wafted and woven into blinkering blankets by the breeze,
To capture fleeing constellations, for none escape her grasp.
Not even her mortal enemy, moonlight, can she let pass
As, unloosening laces clasping cloud’s cape to her neck,
She ensnares the moonbeams, stowing them in her sack.
Like a highwayman on horseback, hooded in disguise,
Steals his gold, she robs moon’s softer silver from before our eyes
And triumphs, like a tigress, as she wins her weakling prey
And, with her denizens of darkness, rules supreme in place of day.