Optimistic Sun

The high ancient cliffs are blossoming
from a velvety spray of pearled blue ocean,
the rough red rocks stretching pillared fingers
into the jeweled eye of the heavens.
Looking west, I see the feathered orb of fire
melting into the glassy abyss of the horizon,
the last tendrils of smoky light reaching forward
and fluttering across my face for one last time.

In the wet swirls of excited air
there are many particles of displaced energy,
filtering through the layered splendor
of the ever-changing atmosphere.
They are searching for a new place to live,
perhaps within the dappled stardust atop the stones
or amongst the windblown trees
with their gnarled purple limbs and emerald leaves,
or maybe in the wind itself, or atop the face
that looks out upon the evanescent brilliance
beneath the newborn moon.

Fading light abounds and dances wildly
with the growing shade of night,
leaving tufts of cloud to reflect the last embers
in the living pools of twilight.
The sunrise and the sunset are very much the same.
They symbolize two polar opposite occurrences
and yet, when caught within the transitory instant
between the world of the waking and the sleeping,
their image becomes unified.
Is birth, therefore, similar to death?

The often-ineffable movement of the earth
becomes poignant in the mysterious hour
when the light rolls beneath the land,
leaving nothing save the intense air of wonder
that pervades the starlit dust of the night sky.
Standing on the tattered edge of the West Coast,
the long-faded reminder of America’s last frontier,
one can see vividly into the ebb and flow of change.

Towers of ghostly majesty now sit
like pharaohs atop what was once
the final breast of the flowering new world,
but light still flickers across the waiting faces
of its vigorous suckling children,
everlasting evidence of tomorrow’s impending sun.

"...a promise that the rock of the world
was founded securely on a fairy's wing."