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ON SEEING ANOTHER SUNLESS DAY
By Quentin Smith
I would rather be unborn than die again
On a gray, tombstone-spattered morning.
The sky is shiningless, dull and dead
As unvarnished silver. Its hangman
tightens his noose, waiting for any colors.
Without any warning,
The day drags its broken wing
Through my eyes. My eyes are penetrated
And are half-blinded by its gentle, dying feathers.
I do not move in this overwhelming torpor.
An exhausted wind now diffuses
like aromatic mustard gas
Through the open windows.
Like the fog of death it leaves me lifeless,
Plastered with apathy on the chair.
Besides me a cheap, hardware store lamp
Flops out its murky light.
Its sickly yellow is helpless
Against the sky’s phantom sheets;
The sky’s ghost-gray sheen drifts in languor
From the hospital rooms of the newly dead.
And I too am part of this world,
That is a forever dying dawn,
Always twilight, without
Any remembered intensity of light;
There is only a whisper of a long absent sun,
A sun that never comes to rescue us
A sun that destroys the sempiternal cloud
With thrashing whips of gold, and
Gilds the usual dawn with the new Infinite.
In the expansion of this crimson space I would write
On the perfect pages of the sun,
And be saved from this fetid, paralyzed life.
Written 1973 and 2002 |