The Sun Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In an arching way, like a cathedral’s loft
The sun whirls over us and dispels the gloom,
Taking gentle fingers to our temples
And raises us up from bed, sets us
Out into the tumult like clockwork from
His spires on high.

Our sphere, the amber king, knows
Each of us by our ancestors’ visages, for
He still shimmers down upon their bones,
And lances down upon them his warm,
Lazy spears, in his strange summer death,
Rarely spoken of.

That man, who shows us how, who
Is the candle in our eyes, who presses his
Hot palms against our foreheads, and turns us
Into the panting redskins, relaxes near the shore,
Where the sea is his mirror, and upon her
He is forever the vane lover.

Yet, there are places that remain naturally
Outside of his drunken glass of light, those
Deep ways where everything is shadow,
For most of the world swims under the dress
Of the sea, whom the sun makes love to,
Not knowing how to undress her surface,
The strange and utter coolness of her luminescent undergarments.

He remains, though, the conductor of our streets,
The window-man to our cities, a phalanx of burning soldiers
In the sky marching from dawn to dusk,
Blindly through our windshields, showing us
The amber dust of our ancestors, the spores of air,
Inhaled by our lungs, the keeper of our eyes,
Reveals to us the day as we rise out of our secret dreams
He soon has us forgotten.