long sentence – Poem Place

The Age of Sunlight

I once heard that light takes
tens of thousands of years to travel from
the center of the Sun to its outer edge,
that it is way older than we think, that
beginning with the fusion of
atoms in the core, light reflects
back upon itself and outward,
bouncing off protons
like a hall of mirrors,
until it finally escapes the Sun’s surface
and begins its journey
into dark and empty space –

Yet, one bright shaft,
intercepted by the Moon,
full on this cold February night,
glances toward Earth, then refracts
through a thin layer of crystalline snow
that had fallen silently as evening arrived
and the clouds lifted, so when
I lean to gather a final
load of firewood for the stove,
the empty field is filled with diamonds.
Is this your journey also? So improbable?
So filled with wonder?

— Steve Peterson

It was hot the other day and my mind wandered back to a childhood memory, a joy I remember from the end of those long, hot summer days after my bath and before bed. Parents downstairs finished up the chores.

I lay near the giant exhaust fan (pre-AC), sang notes into the blades, and marveled at how the fan made them sound so different. A song sung into the end of a summer day.

There are times you can hear the future whispering

like when the sun
sets slowly,
at the end of a hot day:

and then I am
nine years-old,
lying on the varnished
floor near the window fan
at the end of the
upstairs hall;
parents, not yet old,
not yet missing
parts of themselves, but simply
downstairs in their hurried thirties, alive
amongst the clatter of dishes,
in the murmur of voices.

On the floor,
I lean to keen a
single note, like
a bagpipe’s drone,
into the fan’s deep,
curved blades,
which grasp and wrap the
sound around itself,
as if it had gone outside
into the lightning-bug night,
then arrived back inside,
crumpled and worn;
as if what I sang was
a message, a blues-note
bent under the weight
of a journey that
takes years to complete.

– Steve Peterson