Day And Night Poem by Daniel Brick

I An Incident at 11: 00 am

I met a man who told me
Night is a broken thing which
will never again be whole
as Day is whole, and no measure
of wishful thinking can change
the reality of a glorious twelve-
hour day crushing the dark remnants
of night. At this point in his tirade,
he smiled wickedly, and his stare cut
through me. "You're a broken thing too, "
he mocked. I felt my brain slump
in a corner of my skull. "This isn't -
right, " I thought. "There's something
sacred here." I implored the man of
day's ascendancy, "Partners in Time,
surely day and night are partners,
they make one whole. The brokenness
of one is the brokenness of both."
He smiled wider as if my statement
cinched his victory. I tried to speak
again to defend my beloved night.
My lips flapped but no sound came
forth. And my thinking I could see was
blissfully asleep. Blissful. Sleeping.
Are they not the genuine experience of the night?
He sauntered away from me, into a blast of sunlight.

IIAn incident at 11: 00 pm

I found him trying to slip
through a corridor at the edge
of daylight, already pierced
with tendrils of darkness.
"Oh, it's you, " he said. Was he
fearless? Resigned? Bored?
Suddenly I felt a startling sympathy
for him: he was neither my enemy
nor my friend. What we became
this moment would witness and
certify. The sympathy within me
swelled and unfolded the way
darkness takes possession
of a field of lilies or poppies
or lilac bushes in early spring.
I had to attend to these things
of the night. Let him sleep or
cower in fear, but I would not be
the agent of either night move.
I spoke to him in the voice of
a night owl, the voice of a caressing
nocturnal breeze, a voice of soft
shadows: "The night invites you
to join in her mysteries. The night
blesses you whether you stay or depart.
She is a queen who reigns but exercises
no power." I withdrew quickly, so he
could make his choice. I left him
alone and free, in a time zone
equally filled with darkness and light.