To those delicate hours
Between the warm dusk and chilled dawn
Containing time untouched
By my hands, by my eyes
Filled with mystery outside
Of my subconscious activities
What it would be to embrace such hours…
But to acquaint myself into their silence
Would be to sacrifice another time in return
Ought I offer the morning sunshine,
Let it rise behind my closed eyes?
Or perhaps the middle day,
Where I can stage it longingly in the sky?
What of the evening,
The gentle moments of the dwindling night?
And why must our world work this way?
Where to reach the unknown we must give-
Greatly, even- before we take.
So here’s to another day in the sun, and to
Those ambiguous, inevitable hours
…to the existence of which I am aware of…
And the loss I must experience to know.
This is a good introduction to some of my poems named by the date and location which they are written. During the time this was written it was nearing the end of the spring semester where I was juggling four college classes, one full time job as a janitor, a part time job as an painting class hostess, and another part time bartending. Within this time I was constantly exhausted from juggling such a crazy schedule, I had a relationship that was crumbling and shortly after ended, and I had no time to really enjoy the things I used to enjoy.
One morning I remember laying in bed, before work, thinking about how strange it was that my sleep schedule was so spontaneous that I would easily lose track of which part of the day it was. It made me think about the typical daily schedule we all strive for, the way we sleep at night and wake up to the day; with this work schedule I was up for strange times of the day, and it was like seeing a different side of the city and made me think about how silly it seemed that I was so absent from such a period of time. I was fully aware that if I were to try and stay awake to see each hour of the day it would be costly to my physical and mental health, but having experienced those unseen hours (typically between 2 and 5 am) for the first real time made it seem a little absurd that I had to pick which part of the day I wanted to live in.
This confrontation with having to essentially plan my day within the boundaries of a day/night caused me to consider how quickly we become absent to world on a larger scale in the passing of our lives -as we are only part of the waking day before our memory fades out in the dusk that leads into night. The night before went on without us, just as centuries before our existence, and the night will continue on beyond us into the many years on the one-way street of time. In this sense, it made me think of sleep as little quips of our mortality, for in order to experience the next night’s hours we must come to our own ending of days.
This poem for me is a statement to those hours, to regard them alongside the times of which we want to cherish, the sunrise and sunset and midday; we ought to not go into the night so eagerly yet we must respect the inevitability of it.
