After Surrendering Night
After Surrendering Night
Dorothy Nielsen
Solid beams and bedclothes
Confine the night's menageries.
Felines pace in tense corners
And elephants, heads down, stomp softly in place.
If you want to encounter the wild Word
You hope will free your dreams,
Then lay yourself instead unsheltered
Out on the warm sands night after surrendering night.
Let constellations pour watery beams
Over and into you, illuminating unknown Ways.
Let the moon in all her lambent phases
Reflect the Son's image in your upturned face.
Then a royal visitor will approach
Dangerously close. His mane will brush your fluttering eyelids
As He breathes into you undreamt-of freedoms
That unlock the sleeping soul from dreamless fate.
Dorothy Nielsen
Poet & Retired Professor of Literature/Creative Writing
Dorothy has taught at several Canadian universities and is currently a free-lance Creative Writing Consultant. Her poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in journals, collections, anthologies, broadsides and chapbooks in Canada and the U.S. She can be reached at evangelista.poetry@gmail.com.
Photography by Chris Andrawes