Photo by Katie Howell on etsy
In a velvet sky the moon sends down its silver glow
Upon the throne between dusk and dawn.
But the sparkle of stars are eaten by a fluorescent yellow,
Brash against midnight; the lights are still on.
On the main road, cars roll in rumbles low and deep.
Human eyelids held open by machines that never sleep.
Red numbers of a clock pierce through shadows to the brain,
Imprinted in half dreams floating between realities.
Furnace whispers are punctuated by distant whistles of a train,
And the fading wails of sirens rushing to their calamities.
In the big city, the night never comes.
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Started writing this one on a sleepless night. Sleep is always so much better in cottage country when you can’t see your hand in front of your face and it’s so quiet your ears start imagining the sound of air pressure. Technology has allowed humans to break the natural sleeping cycle and stay awake far beyond evolutionary bedtime. The prompt was for a shorter version of a classic form : the curtal sonnet. Hope you enjoyed.
Thanks for reading,
thebookybunhead
From the NaPoWriMo website:
The curtal sonnet is shorter than the normal, fourteen line sonnet. Instead it has a first stanza of six lines, followed by a second stanza of four, and then closes with a half-line. The form was invented in the 1800s by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used it in his famous poem“Pied Beauty”.
thebookybunhead 