Category: Poem

Lux Crescens

The light returns in fractions—
a minute portioned back today, another
tomorrow. I keep the count,
though clouds obscure the evidence:
three minutes banked by New Year’s,
another half-minute folded in,
five more by Epiphany.

The cold arrives in earnest now:
lake effect, the wind that finds
every weakness in the house’s skin.
But the light grows. The sun
keeps its promise without display,
deposits made, retained, compounded.

I watch for five fifteen, for when
darkness once took the day entire.
Now it hesitates. Now it waits.

February measures what accumulates:
an hour restored, perhaps more.
Afternoon lengthens itself,
light touching the sun room wall
at angles I had forgotten. Still
the snow, still the grey insistence
of overcast—but something
fundamental has shifted.

The sun climbs higher, stays longer,
asks nothing in return. This is not
spring—spring lies, breaks its word
too often to be trusted. This is
mathematics, planetary tilt,
the faithful working of the world’s
ancient machinery.

I am owed nothing.
I receive these minutes anyway.

March brings the balance: day and night
held even, aequinoctium.
The light has kept its promise
minute by minute, fraction
by fraction, until the ledger clears.

Not triumph—the cold can still
return, and will—but equipoise:
that moment of level standing
before the light tips into majority.

I have done nothing to earn this
except continue, except persist
through diminishment, watching
the slow reversal, the patient return.

The light grows still.
The light keeps growing.
The promise is not finished.

Icy Stars

Icy stars—
points of ancient fire made brittle by distance,
as though the heavens themselves had entered winter.
They do not blaze; they prick.
They hang, hard and lucid, in a silence sharpened by cold.

Such stars feel less like promises than reckonings.
Their light arrives stripped of warmth,
having crossed immensities where heat was spent long ago.
What reaches the eye is endurance, not comfort—
illumination without mercy.

In winter they seem closer,
because the air has been scoured clean of softness.
Each star stands alone, exact, unblurred,
the sky insisting on precision,
on the refusal of haze, metaphor, or excuse.

Indeed—stars resemble snowflakes.
Each one discrete,
each one sharp with its own geometry,
no two quite alike,
yet all governed by the same severe order.

They fall not downward but inward,
settling upon the mind rather than the ground.
They do not melt; they persist.
What snow does to the earth—
muting, clarifying, equalizing—
stars do to thought.

Yet they are dissimilar in temperament—decisively so.
The star, for all its pinprick stillness to the eye,
is violence without pause:
fusion, a steady hammer at its core,
plasma boiling and convecting within its bounds,
only to be held together by gravity’s unrelenting fist.
Its light is not calm but coerced—
order wrested from perpetual revolt.

The snowflake, by contrast, is obedience incarnate.
It forms in surrender to temperature, pressure, and time,
each facet answering silently to law.
Nothing churns; nothing rebels.
Structure blooms where energy dissipates,
an architecture born not of struggle but of yielding.

And yet—what appears as opposition resolves into fidelity:
both answering to temperature, to nature, to law.

Not submission,
but staying true
to what is given,
to what may not be otherwise.

The star obeys by burning.
Given mass and pressure, it cannot do otherwise.
Fusion is not choice but consequence,
law pressed hard upon matter
until light is forced into being.
Its turbulence is not rebellion
but endurance under extremes.

The snowflake obeys by forming.
Lowered heat, suspended vapor,
the slightest allowance of stillness—
and geometry appears.
No facet decides;
each angle arrives as it must.

Thus neither star nor snowflake is free,
and yet both are exact.
They do not err,
because they do not aspire.
They enact what must be—
and leave us to consider
what it means to call that perfection.

John V Palaiologos: Turning to the Wall

καὶ ἀπέστρεψεν Εζεκίας τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ πρὸς τὸν τοῖχον,
καὶ ηὔξατο πρὸς κύριον…
“And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall,
and prayed to the Lord…”
—2 Kings 20:2 (LXX)

I
Winter withdrew its favour. The palace lay in stillness,
its stones holding the residue of vows
spoken by emperors long buried—
a gold-lit catechism of dominion now muted by cold.
Through corridors dimmed by age
he walked without retinue or herald,
a man whose burden had outlived
the empire he was sworn to guard.
The ikon-lamps flickered as he passed,
their trembling halos soft upon the air.

II
He paused where councils once assembled,
where envoys bent the knee
and treaties were sealed with hopes
already fraying at the edge.
The saints on the walls looked on—
remote as lost kinsmen—
their silence neither blame nor blessing,
only the deep stillness of unchanging gaze.
He felt the breadth of that silence in his bones.

III
Past stewards and tired officers
he entered the inner chambers
where the breath of the world falls thin.
There the bed waited—a narrow shore
between the living and the lived.
He lay upon it gently, as though
the body remembered how to yield
before the mind would grant its leave.
Outside, the city kept its vigil of endurance.
An emperor—basileus kai autokratōr Rhomaíōn—
whose sceptre had become an inheritance
for hands that proved no stronger.

IV
At last, in the quiet appointed to all men,
he gathered the remnants of his strength
and made the gesture Scripture preserved:
the turning of a face toward solitude.
Slowly, without lament or plea,
the emperor shifted toward the wall,
entrusting what remained of breath and light
to the austere mercy of obscurity—
and to the uncrowned hours that follow every reign.

From the Lead-Grey Sky

Proof of gelid gust dusts all we see—
the fence-lines, the avenue, the cars half-buried,
the scatter of November’s leaves
now sealed beneath a stilling plea.
What survives survives by yielding: branches bow,
the eaves let fall their weighted load
in muffled thuds along the yard and walk—
an elemental treaty now.

The world composes its reply
to summer’s claim and autumn’s boast.
No cardinal law, no thunder-host
proclaims what drifts down from the lead-grey sky,
yet everything it touches seeks
to answer why it must comply—
the wild rose hips, the window frames,
the question lingering in its wake.

By morning all dispute is moot.
The snow has made its argument
without a word, without assent,
soft-covering the curb and root,
the path we thought was permanent,
the streets where we were confident
we’d marked our necessary route.

When the Noise Comes

Donald S. Yarab

When the noise comes … it arrives as promise,
As liberation, as the four-day week or some such rot—
Tools to free us from the tyranny of distance,
From the friction of flesh, of paper, of time.

When the noise comes … we open our doors,
Thinking the chains have been struck from our wrists,
Not seeing how they lengthen, how they follow,
How they slip beneath the blankets, coil around our sleep.

When the noise comes … the waves are ceaseless,
Each notification a crest that will not break,
And we are flotsam, buoyant but not swimming,
Tossed up, pulled under, in the very same motion.

When the noise comes … there is no shore,
Only the turbulence of feeds and the whirlpools of threads,
The shoals of outrage hidden just beneath the scroll,
And our eyes blur from the salt and the light.

When the noise comes … we gasp between the swells,
Thinking: surely the next breath will be deeper,
Surely the merry-go-round’s music will stop,
Surely there will be a weekend at the end of this week.

But the calliope plays on, and the carousel never ceases turning,
The painted horses rise and fall, rise and fall,
And we cannot tell if we are moving forward
Or if we have been circling the same worn orbit since morning.

When the noise comes … we look down at our feet,
And see that we have not moved,
That the frantic pace was only the illusion of motion,
The exhaustion mistaken for progress toward something.

When the noise comes … we pause for a moment—
The WiFi fails, the battery dies, the server times out—
And in that accidental silence the low places remember:
The weight of time, the gift of an empty hour,
The deep stillness from which we were torn when we said yes
To this round-the-clock tether, this chain we call connection.

When the noise comes … we have already forgotten
What we meant to think, to say, to comprehend;
The forgetting sea is not ahead but around us,
We are already drowning in its medium,
Already borne away from ourselves
While thinking ourselves urgent, essential, awake.

When the noise comes … no one comes to save us,
For we have built the flood with our own hands,
Subscribed to the deluge, optimized the overwhelm,
And called it opportunity, flexibility, freedom—
The chains that followed us home,
That slipped into our beds,
That wind around us even now as we try to sleep,
As we remember sleep,
As we forget what sleep was.