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Posts Tagged ‘night’

Sitting on the Porch at Night

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 30, 2025| 6 Comments »


 
 
A blue cup. Lemon tea.
Scent of rain.
A drove of stars.
A silence so vast
the mind forgets
to reach for meaning
or purpose and
for a moment
each thing is
exactly what it is.
A cup. Lemon tea.
Scent of rain.
A woman who
does not remember
if she’s a woman
or a star.

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All at Once

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 18, 2025| 8 Comments »


 
 
Walking alone into the dark,
my fear comes with me.
I feel it small and hard
in my belly like a tiny grenade
the mind has conjured
in case I need protection.
Meanwhile, all around me
the night is peaceful.
The dark spills its generous ink
into every open space.
Crickets rub their legs in bright music.
The misty rain makes no sound.
But the mind is not convinced
the night is safe. It clenches tighter
around its fear. It does no good
to tell the mind not to worry.
Hello, tiny grenade.
I carry it with me as I walk
through a field of fireflies—
and I’m laid bare by the beauty
I find there—thousands of glittering sparks.
Isn’t it a marvel how a person
can be both clenching and opening
at the very same time
while moving alone through the dark?

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Perception: A Sonnet

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on February 11, 2025| 8 Comments »


 
 
I take a walk with my whirling thoughts
and the near-full moon and the dark,
and for a time, all that seemed large
in me is no less large, but it’s also a dot,
 
a blip when compared to the whole
of the night, as if the entirety of my life
and the life of my country and the life
of the earth could all fit in a fourteen-line poem
 
with two lines left blank. Because nothing I write
seems to touch how vast, how sublime it is—
the snow moon rising above red cliffs—
only space can convey how humbling it is, the night.
 
 
                                                                                              .

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Before Winter Solstice, I Remember

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 17, 2024| 5 Comments »


 
 
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.

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Driving Across Utah in the Dark

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 22, 2024| 2 Comments »


 
 
Perhaps a valley. Surely desert.
Perhaps a mountain range over there.
Perhaps a whole rhythm of ranges.
Slot canyons, too. And a ribbon
of trees along where a river might be,
the leaves not yet yellow,
the limbs not yet bare.
But all I see beyond pavement
and white and yellow lines,
is thick black night and
a memory of years ago,
driving this same highway,
falling in love with the way light
and shadow played across the vastness.
Somehow I am alive both now and then.
As we wind and climb and curve
through the dark,
I carry that old light with me.

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The Opening

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 25, 2024| 6 Comments »


 
 
I feel it before dawn—
the longing not only for light
but for the vast embrace
of the dark,
the way it links me
to the farthest reachings
of the universe,
the way it holds
each dull planet,
each luminous star,
holds me with no question,
no reservation,
holds all I love
and all I have yet
to learn to love.
With each breath
I bring it into my body,
small sips of dark,
great gulps of dark.
Inside me it swirls
with my love of light,
and this is how the certainties
of the heart are erased—
when I love and ache
in two directions at once—
and what’s left
is so raw, so open,
so alive.
 

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One Wondering About All that Goes Unheard

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 30, 2024| 4 Comments »


 
 
in the temple of night
the only audible benediction
sweet hymn of your breath

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Dark Night

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on December 22, 2023| 4 Comments »

The long night slips into the room.
It swirls around the dinner table
Night wraps around the light
of the candles. There is nothing
in the home it does not touch.
Even the bright music.
Even the scent
of cinnamon and cloves.
Even the ache.
It travels into our hands,
our dreams, our speech,
our song, our toes.
It becomes us,
becomes the reason we pray,
the reason we learn how to sing.

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In Rhythm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 4, 2023| 10 Comments »

Walking the ridge when the sunset
is almost a memory, my daughter
and I make our way through the dark
and we sing an old tune taking turns
with the words and although we can’t see
the dirt road right beneath us, we trust
the road’s there as we step, step again, step again—
it is like that, this life, we lose sight of the path
but sometimes there’s singing,
and sometimes, a loved one’s beside you,
and how does this happen,
the dark’s no less dark,
and the path’s no less lost,
but your feet stay in synch as you step,
step again, step again.   

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After the Film

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 2, 2023| 5 Comments »


 
 
We leave the desert flats of Australia
and the axe and the snakes and the flames
and walk into the quiet, starlit night
 
and become two characters in our own lives.
This is the part where the mother and daughter
lean into each other and walk extra close
 
so they can speak in tones so low
the audience can’t hear their words.
The camera follows them with a low angle tracking shot
 
focused on where their hands are joined,
then it tilts to the sky to end the scene
in an extremely wide shot where our characters
 
are barely a blip on the screen,
surrounded by infinite mystery,
the stars, the only lights.

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