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Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Darkening Afternoons


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

2 comments:

  1. One of my favorite poems is about dusk, by Sone No Yoshitada (c. 930-c. 1000) translated by Kenneth Rexroth:

    The 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

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  2. “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.

    Gonzalinho

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