That Promise

It is not amazing how day
moves into twilight
and twilight to night
except it is
             watching the slow,
sure gradation of light leaving
without fighting the coming night.
That is quite wonderful
and full of meaning no word
can hold that I wish I could find
to say just how it feels,
what great treasure it is
to see something so large
as day nonchalantly change
into night in flawless array
of less and less light.

-Byron Hoot

Byron Hoot was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia and lived there until he went to college – a twelve year excursion. He never returned to West Virginia but he never left it. Appalachia, the hills and streams, the people, his memories of those first eighteen years are deeply embedded. Now he lives in northwestern Pennsylvania. . . still in Appalachia. He has recently had poems in The Watershed Journal, Tobeco Literary Arts Journal, and on http://www.northsouthappal.com./appalachian-literature.html. and accepted poems by The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and in Pennessence. He is a co-founder of The Tamarack Writers (1974) and The Fernwood Writers Retreat (2019).

3 Comments

  1. I love the way the narrator is so full of wonder about such a common event. Very nicely done.

  2. I love how this poem–deceptively simple/complex–gives the sense of one continuous thought, a moment of rapture.

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