The Dawning Of Dusk Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A full day begins upon Autumn’s cusp,
And the women swing back and forth in
The field, cutting the harvest of wheat
And whistling through gaps between teeth.
Their men pound away in a sibilant smithy:
They shape and yew the glowing metal
And sweat drools down their necks,
Evaporating in patches of hair as the
Steam streams upwards in basins where
Their craftsmanship is cooled, then varnished,
And made ready to sale:
Like the two heads of a coin, the couples
Keep by each other as the world turns
Around the axis, another month approaching
Solstice. Cyclical, like a hurricane in
The gut of the Atlantic,
Coiled like a train wreck, a beheaded
Snake belly-up in the weeds, the olds
Ways slip like old men into death while they sleep,
And the gloved hand of technology begins
To drag down the once mystical night.
The stars are chained up on poles above
The workers’ heads and they look up and say,
Marvelous wonder, as the city builds up in
Red-bricked labyrinthine swells, the ghettos
Through the dales, and the lines of workers
Coil and coil through the honking screeching
Metallic fields in a crowded day upon Autumn’s
Cusp, as the scientists discover that God
Might only exist in the mostly empty space
Inside the atom, the world spins like a dizzy
Child playing a game or falling down a well,
Approaching solstice,
The time when the day dusks before its
Dawning.