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    football floodlights shining through rain

    Too Much Glare and Skyglow

    Two Poems

    By Mary M. Brown

    June 27, 2018
    2 Comments
    2 Comments
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    • William Crowe

      Over lit for sure, I remember the country life of my youth when lightning bugs (firefliesour barnyard ancrowenc@yahoo.comd the sky was an endlesswi array of stars. Thanks for the jolt of my memories

    • Dr. George McVicker

      Nice words! I also am a writer but always felt I needed to clean out my closet before chastising others...thus not a protest word.

    Too

    Now they tell us we have overdosed
    on light too, too much Edison, too
    much neon, too much LED (which
    it turns out, pollutes just as much

    as any of the artificial stuff), too
    much trespass and clutter, too much
    glare and skyglow eating at night,

    such a dangerous obesity of light,
    disturbing to closed eyes, somehow
    disrupting the quiet too, the evening
    of ears, the warm womb of dreaming,
    all the various purposes of darkness.

     

    Aftermath

    Last night when the rains came and overstayed
    their welcome again, we remembered how it was
    before the work was done, before the trenching
    and tiling, before the redirecting of downspouts
    and regrading, before the many calculations
    conversations, and caulking, when the basement

    had filled up with water, suddenly, more
    than once, before our epiphany that the fix
    was up to us, when we ran frantic for buckets
    and hoses, mops, rags, and shop-vacs to curb
    the rising and cursed the sump that couldn’t
    keep up, and the flooding felt like justice, like

    punishment for every promise we had ever
    broken, every good deed we had left undone.

    football floodlights shining through rain
    Contributed By MaryMBrown Mary M. Brown

    Mary M. Brown taught literature and creative writing at Indiana Wesleyan for many years.

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    2 Comments
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