Clouded Luminance

Clouded Luminance
By Beth Cortez-Neavel
In the night moon’s glow
the corners of the world are tucked in
and folded down
and the stars vainly whisper
their secrets lost in street-lamp invitations:
“Come dance, lonely passerby,”
they say
“Come twirl
and revel
in our luminance.”
And we revel to forget
that dark cosmos,
hidden
by our fake imitations of those fiery spheres
subtly suggesting our unimportance.
Reminding us our ignorance.
How it is our trivial exclamations:
just a minor trouble
in a wave-length of light.
Our silly selfish hearts
beat in seconds, screaming
“We are the sun!”
The plants smirk timelessly on,
“How quaint.”
So we twirl
dance, in artificial light
dampening the glow
to forget us the indifference;
we quiet the sky with our gasomethaline fog.
And in the night moon’s glow,
we tuck in
we fold down the sky
and fit it into our palms.
We hold the stars’ secrets in our pockets
promising nothing
dancing under the lamps.