Inauguration

Inauguration

Brett Alan Dewing

This day is sharp.
It is trenchant.
This day is alive before the light,
blooming with evident readiness
and tiny men lifting their hats
and eagerly checking the time.
It is something to see.
At least in the darkness it is something to see.
After everything, it is something, to see.

It is painful:
to test the sun with your finger,
to know that it is hot,
a burning, turning ball of flame,
a million strange combustions
now hidden behind the earth.
Even the holes burn.

The expectation, the absence,
the knowledge of light burns.
And we in yet darkness shudder with preflame.
There is no knowledge available,
no sense to be made.
We are being availed of knowing.
Our senses are being made.

A tiny man taps the glass.
They shuffle and take their place.
We are burning with imminent dawn.
And all this time,
tripping and raw, fevered and fallen,
we have borne behind us blazing light.
We are shackled
and cannot escape the sun.

The night is burning with an unspoken word.
Soon the horizon will break.
Soon, in some parlour,
some gentleman will catch his hands
and unshutter the light.
His kingdom will burn,
will gape a maw
and fling a word:
a ghostwhite word with flailing limbs
spit upon the sky
like a prophet on the sand.

You smirk. You smuggle.
You reach a muscled arm from behind our heads
that we will never see.
Testing the edge of the forming hills,
your finger leaves a spray of blood.
“The day is sharp,” you say,
“and may begin.”.

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Brett Alan Dewing
Poet & Playwright

Brett has been published in Windhover, Hammered Out, and *catapult.

Photography by Vadim Sadovski