ALL SOULS DAY
By Dominick Takis
The sun rises on All Souls Day.
All is quiet against the edges of its roseate significance.
Eyes pilot dawn
to pull up the drawn shades
in celebration of all that has gone before.
The first light comes like a vagabond
from out of the dark,
like a poet who’ll correspond
to every emerging rock and stranded moon sliver.
Seen from above, these forms are reflected,
while cloud cover shivers with the alchemy of expectation.
They’ll come like half-formed silhouettes
giving shape to the imagination, an indentation, a footprint
on the lunar dreamscape of sand.
It is there, with the shoreline accentuated in foam,
growing out of the soft glow of the sea
receding to the strength of morning,
transforming the shadow of mourning
the passing of loved ones
like mist in the hills growing further away.
On this day they are near to the hue as the sky breaks up the fear,
and the dark contours of thought are merely detours to steer through,
like a road hugging a cliff,
unforgiving if you’ll stray too close to the edge of a petrified flame,
this old weathered gray shaved
as dawn draws petroglyphs on the walls of the cave
to light the way.
Dominick Takis was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and educated in Boston. He’s a writer and consummate wanderer.
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