Bored light. Words can’t make it new.
We’re too old, and it’s not ours.
Plain sun’s the crux of dead hours.
Twigs tossed past bare panes. We knew
Each print, each crack sun shone through,
Each pulse, each blink we burned through.
Arms crossed, eyes shut, a prayer threw
Shade on all the facts we knew.
We sat with it. Nights felt new
At first, but dusk can take hours
Of its own. Night’s stakes weren’t ours,
Its winks and slow stars weren’t ours,
Lights in the dark we lived through,
Eyes wide in bed for X hours,
While boards creaked and the wind threw
Dreams like birds on the walls. New
Day broke as a day we knew
But with more breaks than we knew,
More weight to the wait, all ours
Now, for us to bear, hard news,
Hatched for us, day to get through,
To mark time while the clouds threw
Grey blurs in grey pools for hours,
And then the light changed. The hours
Still stretched out, huge, but we knew
Now long waves washed us. We threw
Out that prayer. When was that ours?
We leaned to the light, looked through
The smudged glass, and glimpsed a new
Shape to the dull ache, a new
Heft, more like wealth, in the hours,
And we found we could float through
The swells, could swim. Then we knew
What to do. We claimed those days ours.
We caught all the waves time threw,
And we knew we’d been made new,
Would reel in whole hours as ours
Through those long troughs slow days threw.
