Night Light Poem by Gavin Kenneth Shaw

Life lights under my words like a candle under the dew.
Life lights tucked up in the essence of birds.
In my heart,
The Eagle soars.
In my feet,
The trail dust chimes.
And in my words is my soul; in but little pieces.
If God gave me my love then he did not want me, nor intend me to be one,
For my love divides my heart like a gongs skull riding in the open valley.

Love longs and moans in my breast,
Innate, my native skins, my intrinsic sigh;
Blue low lakes leak in the indigo that dies, pained by flight, flying to love, flying to the picture, the portrait of a sky,
High,
For the eyes to reach,
For the eyes to whinny along the red rims in their wild, howling, beautiful and feral blood;
Rocking and stirring by the beat of the stream, rising and sinking in the buckles of mid-afternoon.

Death lights up the million lives that I live,
The billion lives I live within.

Love ruffles my blankets out into the icy night,
Love trickles out Abraham’s blade,
And repairs his prayers.
And in bereavement the armies retreat
Back to their lovers, back to their mothers, and back to their children.
And birth sends them out again, to fight and die without a tongue,
To hate and steal and plunder the soil that crickets sing.

The death note sent its last beat to dance in the sunset,
Where love grinded at the grass,
The grass grew stronger by the hour and swelling and belling in the yellow sun malt,
Concealed all children and serpents in her bosoms,
As the hunters rifles sound and echo in the hills,
As the monks chant the white tusk beams dropping off the moon,

So we may never pull our hearts out of their sockets and merge them in a hymn,
So with our dribbling words we may never, ever understand each other,
So let us sing,
So let us praise,
So let us joy and journey, the love we all understand,
The death where we all band, in our lands together,
Crying as silent as one.