PERFECT PINK                                                                                             

Last night across the sky, a perfect pink, a

cloth, I think, grasped at two corners and

pulled gently off the deep redwood table; to

drop out of sight, following the sun that’s

fallen and will now be gone – indeed, begone

some time in light of next day’s sober solstice.

 

Winter shows the finest falls of raging fire,

as if to pay for the shortness of the day;

a royal drape, shaped just so to match

the template of the darkened land – a

sight that sighs go take the hand of one you love

and say that you will always be a glove for them

when from above there is only woe

weighing down upon their stooping frames,

pushing head to toe in deepening mud that

pulls them down, at times too much for them to bear.

 

But winter calls upon free hands to hoist towards

the short-lived light while night, impatiently,

waits to hide the sore, the sinking souls

we think we do not know, although, in truth,

we must: we glance at them each day for fear of

looking, fully understanding; yet a glance is

enough to find and feel the pain, a pinch of

snuff that remains in the head with all the day’s

doings, all that’s been said, its tides and its times,

and all things half-read, the songs and the prayers.

 

And, being so known, they’ll glance back to find

our own afflictions of confusion and confessions

of the delusions that corral and categorise herds,

not humans – allocations of responsibility for

keeping them, like vermin, well outside the gates.

Yet the debate gets caught on the horns of our own

dilemma that headshaking will not resolve, where

care is the key; and were we all to bear small gifts to

those whose pain we have passed by, we would

be free and our heads would touch the sky.

 

Back then to the sky, the mid-afternoon night

might not delight us quite as much as the last;

a perfect pink slips silently into the wait for

tomorrow only once in a while – which is,

of course, a valued valedictory only if

hope is one of our priceless pleasures, a

treasure trove we cushion in our hearts.

But let us slip onto our sleeves the yield of such

nurture and spread the bounty wide, lest we

hide in our counting houses from the setting sun.