In the Evening

The night air is filled
with the scent of apples,
and the moon is nearly full.

In the next room, Jim
is reading; a small cat sleeps
in the crook of his arm.

The night singers are loud,
proclaiming themselves
every evening until they run

out of nights and die in
the cold, or burrow down into
the mud to dream away the winter.

My office is awash in books
and photographs, and the sepia/pink
sunset stains all its light touches.

I’ve never been a good traveler,
but there are days, like this one,
when I’d pay anything to be in

another country, or standing on
the cold, grey moon, staring back
at the disaster we call our world.

We crave change, but
turn away from it.
We drown in contradictions.

Tonight, I’ll sleep
blanketed in moonlight.
In my dreams, I’ll have

nothing to say about anything
important. I’ll simply live my life,
and let the night singers live theirs,

until all of us are gone.
I won’t say a word, and let
silence speak in my stead.

Credit

Copyright © 2020 by William Reichard. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 19, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem sprang out of contradictions. I was sitting on my bed, staring at the moon and listening to the frogs and crickets, those creatures my friend Janet calls ‘the night singers.’ I was thinking about the ordinary beauty of the world, and I was trying to pay attention to it. I was also thinking about the wretched state of politics in the United States, the deep divisions, the threats to my own rights and the rights of others, and these dualities nagged at me until I wrote the first draft of this poem, not as a solution to what I was experiencing, but at least as an acknowledgment.”
—William Reichard