NOTE: This is the poem I wrote about in my prose piece earlier this morning (Monday). I often tell myself that my poems and such are me preaching to myself. Today I listened to myself and restored this one.

Nightfall Gifts

Almost nightfall. Almost dusk.
The moment colors change.
neither day or night. You learn
each night, a new way to see,

a new way to hear waves,
soft tonight. No threats on the horizon.
No threats on the sandy beach,
still warm with the day’s sun.

It is a strange thing, this peace.
You are not yet comfortable with it,
with the safety of indigo skies
and gentle seas.

No, you are not comfortable with safety in the night,
It is not what life has brought your way.
But here you are. Here it is.
and you will choose to relax,

to let yourself surrender
or else lose this new light,
God’s gift tonight, even to you,
the magnet of pain.

About this poem.

I have written a great deal over the past few years of this new sense of safety and joy I am in, and my lack of the language of joy.

Still trying.

Tom