On Summer Nights

The fallen sky was full of a humming song

fracturing into crimson shards on the horizon

a murmuration of starlings heaved

as if the night was now a surging sea,

now a whale, now a billowing cloud,

now a crouching dancer now suddenly

bursting high up like a head unbowed,

now a jellyfish, swelling, slumping,

now stretching like the thinnest of shrouds

and then ball up into the fist of a titan

dusk was a cooling, clement spectacle

made us forget the day's sizzling heat

and the intense emotional debacle

blanketing our heart like an iron sheet

the flesh regardless had that sort of urgency

whipping our pulse on like marching drums

the mind laden with memories of ardency

boiling in the womb like winged thrums

the brutal insistence of the summer blaze

warded off for the night being

next morning coating emotions like a glaze

made us wish for nights less fleeting