Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2022
In the Hours Between Midnight and Morning
Doris Lynch We escape our souls, even our bodies. In the ebony hours, we ferry meteors tiny as rice grains up the alabaster mountains that in daylight we call clouds. Our child-sized buckets jingle whenever they accidentally touch. Transformed by the power of dreams we wander in the wee hours above the earth, our nightgowns and PJs swishing, slippers loosening nodules of frozen rain, while a hundred million xylophones form a space backup band. Sounds that intelligent beings on another planet might label static or, more hopefully, music. But when we arrive on this sister planet, instead of offering its denizens fiery trinkets or buckets silvery as stars, we stand, mouths agape, unable to sing in any tongue beyond our own. Doris Lynch has recent work in Flying Island, Failed Haiku, Contemporary Haibun Online, and Drifting Sands Haibun. She has lived in places as varied as arctic Alaska, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, New Orleans, Berkeley, and for the last twenty-some years in Bloomington, Indiana.
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