alone in your house. It’s two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story...
In the Secular Night ~ Margaret Atwood
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| Night Windows (1928) Edward Hopper |
The nights are not dark enough.
I sleep with the windows wide open
and wake at all hours, and always the night
is lit above and below by streetlights
or the diaphanous moon. I rise
to look at my garden which murmurs
like a strange sea and seems to heave
and flow; and I don’t know if my room is atop
a tower, or below decks of an abandoned ship.
I only know that I am alone. And it is night.
Without a god to pray to, or ghost lover
to yearn for, or blindness to hide myself
from myself. Only the undark, the unquiet night.
And my breath fogging a pane of glass
with every question I no longer want to ask.
Instructions for Living a Life, a poem inspired by contemporary poet, Margaret Atwood.
