Turning of the Night

As one awakens
in the dark of the night,
after the pause
of disorientation,
and without knowledge
of the time,
there is a feeling
not of the dark
from the light,
or the darkness
in the various moods
we bring to it, and feel from it,
the darkness, from the darkness;

but an awareness
that the night of the day
just passed is over,
and the night of the day
not yet come
has already begun,
an excitement of the unknown,
a participation in the future,
a thread of time
alive in the darkness;

not a child of ambient light,
in our new moon cloudless sky,
but a sense of a difference
in the night, without reference
to the hour, or the season,
or one’s presence of mind.