June light: post your short poems on the longest evenings

[TheRock]

June has always felt like the most poetic month to me. The light lasts longer than seems reasonable, there is something genuinely liminal about an evening that refuses to turn dark. I wanted to start a thread specifically for short poems responding to that feeling, whether literal descriptions of light, or something the season dislodges in you that wants to be put into words.

No rules about form. Rhyme or not, strict syllable counts or sprawling free verse, a single image or a longer meditation. The only suggestion is that it comes from something real, something you actually noticed or felt rather than a poem-shaped construct.

I will put one up when I have drafted it properly. In the meantime this is the space.

[MickFoley00]

Ten thirty and the sky is still bruised blue
not dark enough for stars, too late for birds.
Somewhere between one thing and another
I have been sitting for an hour
not thinking.

Like that.

[Rory_39]

Beautiful. The last two lines especially. The specific non-activity of sitting and not thinking is very hard to write without making it sound affected.

[Rough Reece]

The hedgerow at dusk sheds
its inventory of colour
until only shapes remain.
Even the road goes quiet
as if light took the sound with it when it left.

[Odd Arrow]

That second one has a lovely movement from visual to acoustic at the end. The road going quiet feels earned.

[Kernel]

I have been trying to write something about how the light this time of year makes me feel as if I am slightly outside time. Every draft is too literal. Still trying.

[Vacant Niamh]

Sometimes the struggle to write the poem is more honest than any version you could finish. That tension is worth sitting with.

[BigDog]

My attempt:

My father used to say
the long evenings were borrowed time.
I never asked from whom.
Now I am the age he was when he said it
and I think I understand
we meant the same thing
from different directions.

[Dragon]

That last one is quiet and devastating. The intergenerational transmission of the same feeling without the vocabulary for it.

[DistantSequence]

I am not a poet and I know this is terrible but:

It is still light at ten
which I find alarming
for reasons I cannot
fully justify.

[ElPresidente]

Honestly that last one made me laugh and then feel something. Do not apologise for it.