Study in Light
by Kelly Sawin
And why not consider the moon? That even night’s
most somber hour can’t draw its smothering cloth
over the face of light. Even if the moon pulls back
its tide and wanes away to nothing, still the stars
stab through the felt dark. They glitter and laugh.
Take each other’s hands and dance a round dance
together, circling the sky and falling down with tears
from so much laughter. This is how they fall into dawn:
A cotillion, a quadrille, a rueda de casino. Night
thinking it reigns a while, but for those stars robed
in white casting their fluorescence on how thin
the crown of darkness truly is. How even in the three
day darkness painted across Egypt there was invisible
light beating through faithful hearts in Goshen.
while blind Egypt fumbled through plague. Light
in the electrical signal animating the heart, light
kinetic in the Maker’s every act, even to pinch out
the flame of a sun god. In the nucleosynthetic
bang of male meeting female and creating new
and dazzling life. Light unbearable embroidering
the fabric of all that is and warming the downcast
face of the earth in its most desecrated hour. Because
hours can be desecrated. Time can be desecrated
if not properly held: that is, open, the way the mouth
of a nestling sparrow is held open toward Heaven.
The way the soft throat of a lily is held open to the white
sky in a field of swaying grass. Gaping upward toward
the hand of God that opens in the deepest ache
of night and there, in its palm, is the moon and stars.
For bread. For salve. For a sign over Bethlehem:
the star laughing (rejoicing) at the day to come.
Kelly Sawin's work has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine, The Windhover, River Teeth: Beautiful Things, the Appalachian Review, Susurrus, the Virginia Literary Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the 2024 National Poetry Series, a semifinalist in the 2025 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and in the 2024 Orison Poetry Prize. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her husband and three small children.
