iPoetry-The Short Place Prompt
You Are the Light
A poem
One sodium lamp brightens the stretch between me and home and graveyard
shifts mean I stumble dusk to dawn but you, burning faithfully:
my sentinel
my halo-ringed beauty
my guard against the dark that crouches either side. At a distance, your signal
beams, I’m homeward bound. You, alert above the lone gas station,
which glows its own eerie green
glug glug goes
the slippery stuff, nozzles in travelers’ tanks; sorry souls who mistake
your gracious luminance as flirtation, and so they lean
back and bask, but we both know your hazy wash is mine — to keep
steps from sliding into black dessert (right) or empty gulf (left). Steady on
I and you — pas-de-deux — until I unmistakably yours am caught
in your embrace against the wind-spattering rain and not once have you ever
flickered.
“You Are the Light,” Marvin Etzioni, 1985. Artist: Lone Justice, Geffen Records.
