NORA DELANEY
Noontime Sun

When our most proximal star is directly above,
making bodies shadowless, trees shadeless,
one thinks of water and the necessity of thirst—
or, rather, the necessity of satiation.

The satiation of story-telling:
all the deities and their burning chariots,
driven by flame-hoofed horses,
or solar barges that sail each day across the sky
to dip their blazing cargo down eventually.

How Helios Hyperion—the Sun-High One—
drove his chariot upward
before it plunged back down to the sea;
how he became, also, Apollo,
the Shining Beardless One, and how
Egyptian Aten with his disk of sun,
sprang forth from falcon-headed Ra.

When one is thirsty, one needs stories—
the story, perhaps, of the scattering of light,
and the great, far-off roil of hydrogen and helium
that stirs the roots of Earth’s green things,
that wakes the seeds, the clays of a cold star—
the clay of earthy humankind, eventually.

And slowly, slowly, the stories will extinguish,
as slowly as they arrived, one by one,
as we ourselves extinguish, burned down
with the light of the slow-dying sun.

Back to Issue 13, 2009