Saturday, January 30, 2010

Nocturnal

I love the night. Daytime can be so ordinary, so tedious. That is not to say it doesn't have it's pleasures; it certainly does. Yet daylight, with its sun and sound and motion, serves to reveal the world, and in the process of doing so, obscures myself. It is the night that I truly enjoy. Then, my thoughts are my own, and are free to run at will. The world still awaits, but now it is a quieter place, full of a deep, infinite blackness, and dappled with points of color and light which no longer obscure my thoughts, but focus them. It's only too bad more of humanity doesn't operate on such a schedule. As it is, work and friends and other such things tend to keep me firmly rooted in the daylight hours.


Nocturnal

The weary stars grow dimmer than the dawn.
Their luster fails, and they loose their hold,
fast-slipping from the firmament, then gone.
What happy night can keep from growing old

and merging with the edges of the sea?
We stony sailors of a fathomed sky
make fast our cables to a guarantee
of opiate repose, till, by and by,

the muted moon precedes an errant sun,
who glares, pretentious as a Persian king,
upon a languid world, shaped and spun
of filamental dreams that scarcely cling

to drowsy lovers, as they curse the day
and bid the lurid light to run astray.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now Dawn of the rosy fingers would have dawned on their sleeping, had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene planned it otherwise...

Cartesian Quies said...

Touch'd at her words, the mournful queen rejoin'd:
"Ah! whither wanders thy distemper'd mind?
The righteous powers, who tread the starry skies,
The weak enlighten, and confound the wise,
And human thought, with unresisted sway,
Depress or raise, enlarge or take away:
Truth, by their high decree, thy voice forsakes,
And folly with the tongue of wisdom speaks."

Anonymous said...

Two hearts, two bosoms, and one troth! For lying so, fair Hermia--I do not lie.