The village sleeps. They all miss it.
It’s just me, in the chill
November daybreak,
with an explosive, blazing-red Sunday morning dawn.
Why am I the only one to witness
such a spectacle?
Am I but a lucky hobo with
nothing to his name
except for the open sky
and lonely offbeat hours like this?
.
Red in the morning: surely a storm will come.
I’ll accept the weather as the
price I must pay
for this flaming horizon.
And I’ll accept myself, a
philosophic vagrant,
thinking hard over the big
picture,
and moving through the silent sleeping world
in
eccentric times and places,
lounging out on the frozen snow
throughout the meteor-torn night,
and awakening alone
in
the midst of morning’s fiery skies.
This alien way of mine might be
said, by some,
to
be a karma that I’m cursed to carry;
but its driving necessity comes instead
from being the philosopher’s
chosen means
of monitoring the pulse of all existence,
and
of holding the reins of reason firm
to guide the human ascent and quest.
.
What’s wrong with the world
that it sleeps through this once-only,
raging, radical dawn?
.
[Ross Barlow, 1986]
.
