under an orange sun
but they can lie down together in the dark and wait to die.
Black is the ultimate equalizer.
The moon has made the transition already:
her silver tarnished to dark.
It will be my turn soon: a returning,
back to the night where I am known
where there is no one and nothing else to know.
Let me say goodbye in the shadow of your radiance.
Farewell draws down despair more slowly if you remain,
illuminating for a brief while longer my first steps
off our path into the no woman’s land that waits
before the moon’s true salt engulfs me entirely.
Her tides, sacred waters, will wash me free of your stain,
purifying me of me before I am come again home.
J.S. Watts
Starscape
If I were writing then
I’d take my stylus, pencil, e-vice
to a woodland clearing, up
where the hills bolstered me like pillows.
I’d lie down on my back
wondering at the distant stars
through the lens of the encircling trees
and my poetry would be landscape,
hills, rivers, trees and soil.
The places where our roots lie buried.
Out here my roots float free,
snaking through the cosmos in search
of a new Eden to anchor them
but finding only more space.
My poetry is starscapes,
black expanse of emptiness
with pin pricks of raw perfection.
All different. All the same.
Infinity is relentless without
life’s gravity to anchor it.
There is no love amongst the stars,
just a limitless absence of hope.
No land where I can sink my feet.
