I think you know what I mean. There are instances in our lives we never forget. A lot of them possess some form of intrinsic beauty that impresses itself upon our memories. For me, watching a sunset is one of those moments. Watching a sunset on Midsummer's day is particularly poignant for me.
I used to live in the most northerly part of the United Kingdom - the Shetland Islands. There, on midsummer, at midnight, you can watch the sun touch the horizon and then start its ascent again. It's magical. It doesn't help much with sleeping. But it's magical.
And so I recalled the magical moment of sunsets by writing a snapshot poem called Midsummer. Where I am in the South West of England, we don't have the delight of watching the midnight sun, but we do have very light nights. So I wrote what someone has termed 'a breathless' poem. You can't read it out in one breath (ok, there's a challenge for you to disprove me...). It has no punctuation, and it has no upper case letters. It's just a grab at a very small fragment of time. What I'm trying to do here is use the words in a sharp flow without interruption to try to describe and capture the moment.
Let me know what you think - of the poem sure, but more importantly, of the technique of capturing that one moment in time through the use of a flow of words.
Personally, I think it's so much better that using a camera.
Midsummer
yellow fireball conjugates with hot dolorous red behind the rapid black arterial branches that reach out to grasp like antiseptic sutures gripping tight on wounded flesh where bark falls slow away from boughs in cool arborial langour creaking onto forest floor the globe glowers alone suspended lonely like a dust mote dancing in a shaft of golden light and yellow fireball sinks toward its fine denouement glowing dragging red and ochre shards like old detritus from a shattered wooden cart the yellow fireball soft departs just like a slow train leaves its platform while the purple and the black flow in so inexorably to claim the vacant space it leaves while myriads of coloured points the sprinkling of a dim and distant host of lights so silently appear and blink in place to stand like sentinels for the greeting of elusive dawn
Steve Wheeler © 22 June, 2023
Image from Wikimedia Commons by Arne Eide
