The Gloaming

 

The Gloaming

after a pen & ink drawing by Greg Hastings

 

All roads are middle ground, a cutting

through space and time. All journeys are paths.

We venture through sleep on liminal highways,

night what comes after this setting sun,

this brightly wrought prospect of dreaming,

this melting of torc by dusk.

 

Starlike celandines and buttercups implode,

and autumn gorse dresses a lane to sea,

that place where Plath went blackberrying,

that just-over-the-horizon entity, magnet of death,

centre of chaos, conversely of order, and peace –

in the eye of the storm, the centre of life.

 

But this light is not fenced in, pours, spills

out over barriers, not unlike water, or words,

races ahead in thought, makes colour silken,

embellishes blue with green. We know these lines,

this form, walk through prisms of existence,

find ourselves stopping – an outsider looking in.

 

Orla Fay

The Gloaming is written after a pen and ink drawing by West of Ireland artist Greg Hastings. His Instagram page can be viewed here.