There it sits hovering above the trees
Round and full and bright
No cloud dares to pass its face
They just float by in wispy fright.

The earth far below is strangely still
Not one creature makes a sound
And although everything's bathed with silver
Not the smallest movement can be found.

An owl squats on a dead tree limb
Yellow eyes tells that it sleeps not
But its familiar questioning "Whoo?"
Apparently, it has forgot.

Dark shadows gather on a grassy hill
Wolves, back from their nocturnal hunt
No howls lift skyward from night's predators
They're as quiet as soldiers approaching the front.

Nowhere in the forest or in the sky
Do the voices of nature call
This strangeness can have only one cause
The glowing ball of white entrancing all.

To gaze at it one would wonder
Why it is evoking so much fear
For it looks to the untrained eye
As it always has, so far, yet so near.

Summer is gone and Winter awaits
It is deep in October now
Autumn leaves painting the trees
Seem to tremble on every bough.

Change is coming,in this magical time
Before snow the earth once more hosts
A time when anything is possible
A time for fairies, and wizards, and ghosts.

That is why the owls sing not their question
Nor the wolves bay as they did in June
For now the mystical world is at play
Beneath the haunting gleam of a witch's moon....

BARBARA OSWALD, lives near Montreal, in Canada. She is a long-time Purr contributor with her friend Bernice Lowe. Both writers were recently interviewed on a Canadian TV station. Barbara just won an editor's choice award from the National Library of Poetry for a poem that is coming out in their Best of 1997 anthology.