Sometimes night is night and stands around our house
like a loitering crowd in dark coats, waiting for lamps
to die and moths to seek other stars or settle ash wings
against inside screens, wanting that broader, wide sky.

Other times night is a great black horse, hard-worked
and foamed at the bit, his spittle captured by Hubble’s
stare and galloped to dreamers here on earth, nebulae
herds of painted ponies and appaloosa comet tails.

And we ride with these faces pressed into his lathered
neck, fingers of one hand holding fast to a feathered
mane.  Between our legs night’s power pumps, its dark   
moving apace to cross a turned line of horizon.

And sometimes, lifting our heads from sleep to light
we find a moth on the screen who waits, not lost.

Must be something in the spring
                                            water
that has so many of us writing in sonnet-form lately. Hope y'all are saving something for the corona.

How can you go wrong with this one: stars and nebulae and Hubble pictures of deep space objects...and the waiting moth.

Could the moth be lost instead of waiting?

larry

I like lost as much as I like waits, larry.  Maggie

I think it's extraordinary.

not sure about lost . . . but am thinking about using  "dock" or "docked" somehow.
i never get the feeling those moths of morning screens are lost; i think of them as waiting for the next bright attraction they can be drawn toward, docked, in a sense.

thanks bob, larry, mags, el vee. 
not sure who moved this, but thanks you.

ld

yous welcome

thought i'd post original here as I've made a change to end line. 

ld

Thought I'd post the revision here as I love the change to end line. Magnificent, Lynn. The face in lathered neck, the couplet. The poem has given night, I meant to say, but yes, light too--new romance for me. Tom

thanks, tom.  the new last line doesn't work for me, but i haven't figured out what to do with it yet.  [the 'we find' later followed by 'neither found' was unintentional and reads off to me now.  ah well. 

ld

The waiting moth was mysterious, like he was hanging round just to see what would happen.

I liked him.

I did too.  Might get put back, but will give another 'night' of thought first.  Thanks, el.  You know what?  I think I'll change it back now, as it's my preference over new one at the moment; I can always change in a new direction if I think of something better.  Yeah. 

true, true :)

Lynn, your poem is like the horse you describe.  Sounds odd, or too easy--me saying that, but it fits so well.

Surely there's a name for this kind of phenomenon--some kind of unity?

Beautiful, awesome poem,
cheryl

thanks, cheryl.  i don't know what it is with horses lately.  i've used them twice in recent poems and it's been fifty years since i rode a horse everyday.  and thirty years since i've been on one.  but there's something, true, when the rhythms of horse and rider are in sync [so i take your compliment in a very good way!].  have to say, that last time i was on a horse, 'sync' was not the word I'd use to describe how it went ;).

ld