KELLY SHEPHERD

Penumbra

Are we afraid of the dark
because we know shadows are really prayers?

Light has only to touch something.
Imagine a hand made entirely of pollen,

fingertips on your face,
the nectary exhalation of a flower.

A water-strider’s footprint.
Light is the colour of the sound of the touch

of an eyelash on your cheek,
a molecule of water, the falling wing of a mayfly.

Imagine the smallest possible way to say goodbye.
Darkness is what we can’t see;

light is what we don’t know we are seeing.
The barely-there, the blink

-and-you’ll-miss-it, the slightness
that grows into morning.

The patterns left behind by bumblebees
and other endangered angels.