Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

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Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.