PAD Day 8: A Lunar Ghazal

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write a "love" and/or "anti-love" poem, and (2) write a ghazal. Well, a ghazal is traditionally a love poem anyway, so combining the prompts is a no-brainer. The ghazal, of course, is at least five couplets, and uses the same end word (or phrase) for both lines of the first couplet and the second line of all the other couplets. There is no actual set metric scheme, but the word before each instance of the repeated end word rhymes with the other such words in the other lines. In my case, I did use a meter - a rather lose iambic hexameter, and I used slant rhymes for the rhyming words (harvest, carver's, largest, etc.). Also, most traditional ghazals have couplets that are independent of each other but linked in some logical way. Mine was more of a narrative, a "love story" of sorts.

Phases
 
We met beneath a brilliant orange harvest moon,
A chilled and clear, frost-painting, pumpkin-carver’s moon.
 
We talked astronomy—you wondered whimsically
If Ganymede was actually the largest moon.
 
But in a while our words became more intimate—
One night we kissed and watched the crescent-sharpest moon.
 
We blossomed like two twilight constellations might,
Till we fell out, under the new, the darkest moon.
 
You soon left town without a word, and I was lost—
The sky was black, with nothing but a starless moon.
 
I vowed to find you, I would try to win you back,
I’d roam the universe, even the farthest moon.
 
One night you called, and said you missed me terribly—
I smiled and said, “Me too,” beneath that marvelous moon.