DARKENING
AFTERNOONS
I
love the wooden beauty of darkening afternoons
Softly
varnishing the oldness of the sky,
Weathered
like the brows of studious hills.
Stillness
dwells in the air like a great thinker,
Pondering
forgotten equations, hidden runes.
Clouds
are flecked with the fires of beaten copper,
Skies
limpid with the blues of pale oceans.
Shadows
weave fingers through grass looms
As
fields gaze blankly at the sun.
Birds
grasp at the last utterances of a prayer,
Day
vanishes like a broken pot.
Dusk
is redolent with the aged interiors of sleeping cabinets, richly inhabited.
Originally
published in Boston Poetry Magazine
(September 4, 2014)
 |
| The Malvern Hills by Ken Bushe |
One of my favorite poems is about dusk, by Sone No Yoshitada (c. 930-c. 1000) translated by Kenneth Rexroth:
ReplyDeleteThe lower leaves of the trees
Tangle the sunset in dusk.
Awe spreads with
The summer twilight.
Source: Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 307.
Gonzalinho
“Darkening Afternoons” is not the first poem I wrote, but among the poems I have published, it is probably the earliest one I had written.
ReplyDeleteGonzalinho