Tag Archives: After Midnight

Shhhhh

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full moon morning, jdbphoto 2017

4 A.M.

It is too early to be stirring, the world is still asleep.
The sound is all still slumbering, the darkness is too deep.
No dayness stirs the nightness. No touch is reaching out.
No stirring and no blowing. Not a whisper. Not a shout.
When I wake before the world does, it seems the end of things
instead of the beginning, when the whole world sings.
Sun rises and the birds demand. The dogs whine for their feed.
All the world around me awakens to its need.
But for now, they are all sleeping. It is a lifeless world.
Its eyes and ears and mouth closed, around me densely curled.

Shhhhhh. This is quiet alliteration–not so much that it calls attention to itself…

For MVB’s Prompt: Alliteration.

Jumpin’ Jupiter, Wordless Wednesday, Sept 28, 2022

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Click on photos to enlarge.

Photos of Jupiter in overcast skies from my pool, 2:30 AM, Sept 27, 2022, San Juan Cosala, Jalisco Mexico. Did anyone else observe it? Largest view we’ll have for the next 58 years. If you took photos, please send me a link in my comments. I had a hard time getting these as the clouds kept floating over and obscuring the skies. I stood in my pool for an hour or so trying to get decent shots. 

For Wordless Wednesday

UFO

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UFO

You made your appearance without much excitation,
probably due most of all to your orientation
poised above my housetop and slightly to the right
for almost an hour that clear October night.
It seemed no one was watching—too early or too late
for the world  to witness and to start a great debate
about bizarre lights in the sky that could not be explained.
Perhaps only I watched as your brilliance flared and waned.
And who am I to ruin my integrity
by sharing with the world what was only viewed by me?


Prompt words today are:  watched, orientation, bizarre, integrity and appearance. Image by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash.

Night Sky over Chapala, After Midnight, June 26, 2021

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After a huge thunderstorm, the rain stopped and I went out to take an after-midnight swim. Luckily, I’d taken my iPhone out to listen to a book as I did my water exercises, and used it to try to capture a photo of a rare firefly that clung to the branch of an Areca palm hanging out over the water. I couldn’t capture it, but luckily it did make me notice an incredible moon and cloud tableau over my neighbor’s house that is pictured in the gallery below. This is the scene: mist surrounding and rising up into the night-chilled air from the hot water of my geothermally heated pool, clouds swirling around the moon. Click on the individual photos below to enlarge them. 

 

For Hammad’s Weekend Sky Prompt.

Gone Fishing

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Gone Fishing

I brandish my brain and confer with the night,
assiduously, wait for new thoughts to bite.
I go fishing for words that will serve as the bait
as what I am thinking I try to relate.

Floating on dreams, I troll their broad sea.
As I fish in them, I’m fishing in me.
Pulling out words from the seas where they ride
bright flashes of light that bring them topside.

Who knows what deep currents wash shores of insight
unless we cast nets to draw them to light?
In our forgotten midnights, their legions are teeming.
We must troll their dark depths for these riches of dreaming.

The lush waters of night invite interruption.
They do not view our hooks as corruption.
We’re their reason for being. They are food for our thought.
We cast lines in their depths that we may be taught.

Prompt words for today are brandish, confer, assiduous and forgotten. Painting by Isidro Xilonzochitl.

Geminid Meteor Shower, Dec 14, 2020

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Is anyone else watching the Geminid Meteor shower tonight? I went out for an hour and twenty minutes and saw 13 meteors. The sky was always clear in patches, although most of it was cloud-covered. I could always see from four to a dozen clear stars and the meteors, which were supposed to all be emanating from the proximity of Gemini, instead all had completely different trajectories. Some were horizontal, some diagonal and some completely vertical in their paths and they seemed to come from different parts of the sky. It is a somewhat chilly night and I was sitting in my short nightgown with a warm top pulled over it, so now that I am in bed, it feels good to have the duvet over my frigid knees and toes. The boy cat is kneading the duvet cover by my shins. If it were the girl cat, she would be lying on my legs or on the space between them, warming me up a bit, but the boy cat lies by my side, extending his claws to pull at the duvet cover. If there were bare flesh exposed, he would not discriminate between the two.

I don’t know how the twenty minutes since I came in passed so quickly, but it is now 2 A.M. and the shower is supposedly at its height now so I suppose I’ll go out again, lean back in the padded metal chair, and get dizzy from bending my neck back to peer up at the sky. Earlier, Forgottenman kept me company via phone, but he has perhaps gone back to his program or to bed. Here I go lonely into the night to see what performance the universe has prepared for me. The count i presently at 13. I’ll give it one more go, but this time I’ll take a blanket along.

Back inside again at 2:40. In 20 minutes, I saw seven definite comets and possibly three others that were so faint that I questioned whether I really saw them or it was my imagination. So in the first hour and twenty minutes, I saw 13 and in the 20 minutes after 2 AM I saw 7. So much for scientific notation. I need to turn on the heated mattress pad to try to get my feet and legs warm. I still have on my warm top over my nightgown. Plans are to sleep in it. Kitty is curled up by my side. I’ve let Forgottenman off companion duty. All’s right with the world.

On My Way Home

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It isn’t very far from my studio in the garden to my bedroom door—just about 6 feet of sidewalk, then a twelve foot steep ramp that used to be just the wall beside the stairs down to the basement kiosk that I had added a hand railing to and maybe 8 feet across the patio, but laden with a lamp I’d just repaired, my computer, phone, two tubes of glue, an empty cup and my hank of keys, it was a bit of a balancing act. It was nearly 1 a.m. and pitch black outside and I had the studio to lock up and then the house to unlock. But when I saw the loaded  hibiscus bush in full bloom at night, probably due to the motion-detector light that the dogs had been setting off all night-, I knew I had to take a photo. So, everything in my arms went down on the sidewalk while I searched for my phone, with no success! So, about face, open the door and the search for the phone began. I finally had a flash of memory of putting the phone on the grinder when I had used the bathroom earlier. On my way out of the studio for the second time, however, I noticed Diego tracking something along the ground and noticed a beautiful small beetle. Then, two more on the screen. So, if I hadn’t decided to photograph the hibiscus and if I hadn’t left my phone in the studio, I never would have noticed these two varieties of beetle that I’ve never seen before. Finding the treasures in adversity. One of the great learnings of life. Here is what I saw on my short way home from the studio tonight:

(Click on photos to enlarge.

Night Owl

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Night Owl

With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––

I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a momentary interlude.

When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.

Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.

 

For the Early Bird or Night Owl Prompt.