Cycle

My take on last week’s Poetry Rehab Revolution prompt http://andytownend.com/2016/02/17/poetry101rehabrevolution/ could serve equally as a response to today’s Stellar and Lunar prompt https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/4582321/938691290 This is my first new poem in a while and gives vent to my repressed painterly ambitions. It is also influenced by research I have been doing recently on the Bortle Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale I should add that some of the science in this poem is, for reason of poetic license, deliberately wrong.

Morning

Patches of eggshell blue

vie with the mushroom-white

façades of tower blocks;

drizzle darkening the upper part of the sky;

falling over peeking greens of trees.

Midday

Bright whites and gleaming grays

bathe in vertical yellow

falling from a uniform & clear

blue sky

Evening

Pinkish dusk descends,

blotted by gray,

inky blue, indigo.

Wisps of off-white clouds

lit by artificial light

etch the slate gray

sky of nearly night.

Night

Orange-tinged blankets of cloud

obscure the deep black of night.

There is no milky way,

no zodiacal light.

The city has left the galaxy.

Lit windows of apartments

go out one by one.

Coda

Sun winks

as earth

completes its revolution.

Living beings stir

& align their eyes

to changing electromagnetic spectra.

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The Desk Lamp

[My contribution to this week’s Poetry Rehab prompt http://andytownend.com/2016/02/08/poetry-101-rehab-papers/ is another prose poem from a time before computers, a quarter of a century ago.]

The Desk Lamp

My desk lamp illuminates me. Suspends most of the world in undistracting shadow. Especially, it dispenses its luminosity to my unclothed hands and face. It clothes my skin with a glow of self-importance. It inspires and encourages me; a benign Cyclops, lays a single avuncular arm around me and persuades me that I could write, if I wanted, not about concrete objects only, but about myself.

But, when I notice the far greater brilliance it imparts to the page beneath my hands, I am driven to leave all but a fraction of it magnificently blank.