Among Night Skies

An explanation, a sonnet, and a haiku

Dear friends,

I have been woefully absent here over the last two weeks—many apologies! I do feel like readers and friends deserve a little explanation, but it comes hard to write about my ongoing health issues.

Simply migraines—at least that is all that the doctors recognize at present—they have become increasingly debilitating. I’m running three to five days with symptoms and only one to two days without. Medications can reduce the symptoms… some of the time. Unfortunately some of the current symptoms have worsened, and these include photophobia (which makes it difficult to read or write with any comfort), phonophobia (which is milder but still makes it difficult to listen to readings), and brain fog, which makes anything and everything difficult.

All this is just an explanation of why I’ve gone missing here, of why I’m not more actively following others’ Substacks and why my own have grown shorter. I would love to participate more actively, but I simply can’t do it at present.

Meantime, I hope at least to catch up on comments left in these pages. I’ll try to catch up a little bit with friends. I’ll keep writing because life is best when I write.

And now I’ll walk off from explaining about all of this because I prefer to deal with it in the most cursory ways possible. To put my strength into things that I can do. To pursue the delight of interacting with things I love. To hold as much beauty and wonder as I may. To set aside as little time as possible for pain and as much as possible for the glory of life.

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For all that, I do have a sonnet for this post. One that looks up to the night sky.

Sonnet

In what great pantheon have we found birth?
The hundred-colored rainbow glows by day;
By night the starpath of the Milky Way
Creates a vaster arch above the earth,
Enfolds beneath its presence the whole girth
Of love and sorrow, faith and falsehood, clay
And spirit as we know them.  Shall we say
How small we are in the vast cosmos?  Worth
So little in the scales?  The laugh of one
Small fish in water, joy of birds in flight
Or trees when sap is rising, deer that run
Through fright or frolic…  Tremble, stars, though bright,
For life bears colors which no rainbow ever spun;
Our loves bear brilliance far beyond starlight.

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Cassiopeia
leans back, languid, on her hands. 
Summer nights come late.

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Under many stars,
many sounds of summer nights,
many crickets sing

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