Sonoran Twilight
a sonnet of spring dusk
This week’s poem is a description of the arrival of dusk last Monday. Twilight lasts long and beautifully here. The desert light creates a bright sort of dusk in which the colors gradually fade to gray while still shedding a luminous visibility over the hillsides and valley.
The gentle falling of night was a good time to return to the Spenserian form for this sonnet. This highly repetitive rhyme pattern has the capacity to express a melodic lilt which (to my ear, at any rate) was much more intrinsic to Tudor English than at any time since. The language can still create this flow, however; and I hope that I occasionally achieve it.
Sonoran Twilight
All through the twilight air, the quiet breeze
Is moving with the valley’s ebb and flow;
The palo verde and acacia trees
Sway gently in the evening’s azure glow.
The day is fading, and I see night grow
As hue by hue here melts into the gray;
The day is done, but night is coming slow;
It’s following the path the breezes stray
Along and with them finds a sweet delay.
No more pale pink lies on the mountain’s crest;
The golden flowers imitate sun’s ray
That’s gone now; night awakes, and sun finds rest.
The moths seek nectar while the dusk is long,
And breeze is rich as birds sing evensong.