Day longs for Evening—
Day knows, in spite of everything,
Evening can’t fail: Ancient, Luminous …
Snap the golden chain—
Step Boldly toward sunset!³
If you look east, at sunset,
You see Night Rising, not falling:
Darkness lifts into the sky,
Up from the horizon—like a Black Sun—⁴
Night hurls darkness, Love’s Shade, over its enemy: the day—
And makes the world such Blind & Shapeless thing
As ‘twas before light did from darkness spring.⁵
‘Tis a Cruel fate, if the night is
Too late to Undo the work of the morn—⁶
Day is done: Darkness falls from wings of night,
As a Feather wafts down, from the eagle, in its flight.⁷
Black Milk of daybreak—we drink at Evening.⁸
The hours have passed with stealthy Flight,
We needs must part: good night, good night—
We part in hope of days as Bright
As this gone by: good night, good night!⁹
Your whole day is
Barely the start of my Sunset.¹⁰
¹ Subha Sunder, Dragon Girl
² Denise Levertov, The Day Longs for the Evening
³ Gasan tr. Lucian Stark & Takashi Ikemoto, Invaluable Is the Soto Way
⁴ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
⁵ Jasper Mayne, Time
⁶ Margaret E. Sangster, Our Own
⁷ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done
⁸ Paul Celan tr. John Felstiner, Death Fugue
⁹ Joanna Baillie, Good-Night
¹⁰ Fatamah Asghar, Pluto Shits on the Universe