Sunlight just
before dusk
adds gold to fir trees'
green--shadows
in the boughs, dark lapis.
And sky's color
behind is at its palest
blue all day. I've
seen this burnished image,
only slightly varied,
hundreds of times
in the Sierra, in Sweden
and Germany, in
Istanbul and the Pacific
Northwest.
When it soaks in,
it always generates
a slow longing,
an impersonal sadness
involved with grandeur,
peace, and hope--all
far, far out of reach.
The heart, as we call
that mental zone, pretends
to want to ask the trees
to stay in that light,
beg the scene never to leave.
The question's
really a way to savor the mild
spiritual soreness, this
free-radical yearning,
this old, old emotion
which even other species
of hominid felt,
drawing from an immense,
invisible psychic lake.
hans ostrom 2017
before dusk
adds gold to fir trees'
green--shadows
in the boughs, dark lapis.
And sky's color
behind is at its palest
blue all day. I've
seen this burnished image,
only slightly varied,
hundreds of times
in the Sierra, in Sweden
and Germany, in
Istanbul and the Pacific
Northwest.
When it soaks in,
it always generates
a slow longing,
an impersonal sadness
involved with grandeur,
peace, and hope--all
far, far out of reach.
The heart, as we call
that mental zone, pretends
to want to ask the trees
to stay in that light,
beg the scene never to leave.
The question's
really a way to savor the mild
spiritual soreness, this
free-radical yearning,
this old, old emotion
which even other species
of hominid felt,
drawing from an immense,
invisible psychic lake.
hans ostrom 2017
