Dark Thirty

All year, death, after death, after death.

Then today look how majestically clouds float in the sky,

God putting on a show of tenderness, nothing like thoughts

that rise and drift in my mind, like flakes shaken

in a snow globe, and my brain laboring in its own night,

never feeling the punky starlight of dark thirty, the time

a friend said for us to meet and had to explain it was half an hour

after the first dark, when daylilies fold up and headlights

lead the way home, but maybe too early

to find the moon turning half its body away,

holding it hidden like the black side of a mirror, unseen

until it breaks, unexpectedly, the way grief

breaks over you when you've already given all you've got

and hands you tools you don't know how to use.

The blush of dark thirty turned bleak

when I heard about the O—

O dark thirty, military time for 12:30 a.m.,

hour of the deepest dark, when, if I'm awake,

as I often am, a storm of thoughts battle one another, now settling

unsettlingly on the ways we make war and flaunt it.

Take the Civil War double cannon the lawn

of a city hall in the deep south, twinned so that two cannonballs

chained together kill two at a time, often decapitating.

And why did a small town, population 932, in rural New Hampshire,

import a ballistic missile to crown its village green?

Brecht's line floats up: "Pity the nation that needs heroes,"

but what to do with the guy pontificating on the Middle East,

telling me with the gravest authority—

that of stupidity—the reason for the strife there:

"Hatred is in the rocks."

Copyright Credit: Barbara Ras, "Dark Thirty" from The Last Skin. Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Ras. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: The Last Skin (Penguin Books, 2010)