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Midnight Sun

by  James Graham

Posted: Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Word Count: 105
Summary: I wrote this in 1976, after a walk on the cliffs in Islay. The title is poetic licence - the sun was setting at about eleven o'clock.




Midnight Sun

There was a shallow sigh.
The single eye of heaven
rolled upwards.
The sallow moon,
disarmed by the sun's long
arrogation of the night,
seemed to say aye.
The wasted sky,
too weary to recall
an old euphoria of winds,
made no assertion.

Yet the ocean rose against it.

Though it heaved and wrenched
its fathoms into fingers
white at the nerve-ends,
and tumbled in its bed,
it could not lay
the wide-eyed phantom
watching at the foot.

Poor insomniac, neither free
nor rock-fast, though it thrust
its fingers in the eyes
of spying caves,
the ends of earth
endured their light wounds.