From The House of Edward

The Flower Moon

In icy fullness he sits aloft, enthroned in the blue-black January sky, a lambent wizard whose incantation of frozen light is cast down over snow covered hills for the wolves to find their way home. He does his best throughout the year to live up to the names he’s been given and the first month knows him, by legend and lore, as the Wolf Moon.

He’s christened Pink in the month of April, as he gently drapes the glow of a rose petal over the luminous newness of a Spring night, while the chill of October finds him clad in the orange robes of a Harvest Moon, illuminating the autumnal gold that is sprinkled across the dark fields of the world.

But as all lovers of his magical light can easily agree, he achieves the full height of his powers in May. For this month, this very night in fact, he becomes the Flower Moon, when the spirits of beauty flock to the gardens to drink in the sight of May flowers aglow. They stroll down moss pathways in clear star-strewn dresses, beneath radiant rose arbors he has lit so divinely, they look as though all the world’s fireflies have come there to pose. Indeed every flower, from the aristocratic white orchid on the manor house windowsill to the happy brotherhood of bluebells that holds court on the forest floor - like gemstones from Heaven, all shall bedazzle tonight.

So, look to the flowers when the warm sun sets. For no candle, no kleig, no footlight or floodlight could ever compare to the pure, perennial splendour
that is the Flower Moon of May.


FLY NOT YET

Fly not yet; 'tis just the hour
When pleasure, like the midnight flower
That scorns the eye of vulgar light,
Begins to bloom for sons of night,
And maids who love the moon.
'Twas but to bless these hours of shade
That beauty and the moon were made;
'Tis then their soft attractions glowing
Set the tides and goblets flowing
Oh ! stay, oh ! stay,
Joy so seldom weaves a chain
Like this to-night, that, oh! 'tis pain
To break it's links so soon.

by Thomas Moore