Starlight

notes after midnight

Sweet star light,

tender lumens,

transfigure me in your velvet embrace.

Threads of silk,

angularities of form,

swathed in a smile kept just for me.

I await,

in quiet penumbra.

Birds process.

It is not yet morning.

Lustre of the palisade—

the sun’s rage is rebuffed by this fury of stars.

I bide,

in time belonging neither to the day

nor to the night.

This mystery strides across the universe,

two strangers passing on a bridge,

the sun and stars are known to me—

both at once and before.

I am becoming.

It is not yet morning.

My longing is mirrored in the stars,

as unrequited as the tide.

I breathe the black, the moonless night.

What angels hear me through such melancholy?

Even the clouds flee from this sigh.

Oh, earth, catch me as I fall.

It is not yet morning.

We are scattered upon the skies,

our existence stretched among the stars.

Night rushes and we are held in a pitcher,

To be poured out over an outcropping of desires and regrets.

We are words in the poetry of night.

It is not yet morning.

I walk in the counterfeit nights,

evenings of mouldering waste.

From an angel’s wing falls a moon beam.

A light streaks across Orion and leaves us behind.

We are struck under the silence of all beings.

I bide, beneath an unrecognized gaze.

It is not yet morning.