The day after the summer solstice

a poem

Day after the solstice sunset in Flint, Michigan (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)

Yesterday my own bones
told me winter was gone, and yesterday I felt like dancing, something bluesy and slow
to make it last,
a brocade of sunshine
on my arms. Yesterday I
sang to my plants,
begonia and rose. They promised more buds in
the sundrops thick as rain.

But today’s light, scant minutes less, begins
to whisper back to dark. The long days end

so fast, shafts of light speeding across the floor. I want to hold them in
my hands like

A luminous salt, but
They are phantoms
Fading and fading. Sad slanting ochre falls like an old woman’s shawl from a kitchen chair, slides away from an open door, slips from the sides of maples.