In an arching way, like a cathedral’s loft <br />The sun whirls over us and dispels the gloom, <br />Taking gentle fingers to our temples <br />And raises us up from bed, sets us <br />Out into the tumult like clockwork from <br />His spires on high. <br /> <br />Our sphere, the amber king, knows <br />Each of us by our ancestors’ visages, for <br />He still shimmers down upon their bones, <br />And lances down upon them his warm, <br />Lazy spears, in his strange summer death, <br />Rarely spoken of. <br /> <br />That man, who shows us how, who <br />Is the candle in our eyes, who presses his <br />Hot palms against our foreheads, and turns us <br />Into the panting redskins, relaxes near the shore, <br />Where the sea is his mirror, and upon her <br />He is forever the vane lover. <br /> <br />Yet, there are places that remain naturally <br />Outside of his drunken glass of light, those <br />Deep ways where everything is shadow, <br />For most of the world swims under the dress <br />Of the sea, whom the sun makes love to, <br />Not knowing how to undress her surface, <br />The strange and utter coolness of her luminescent undergarments. <br /> <br />He remains, though, the conductor of our streets, <br />The window-man to our cities, a phalanx of burning soldiers <br />In the sky marching from dawn to dusk, <br />Blindly through our windshields, showing us <br />The amber dust of our ancestors, the spores of air, <br />Inhaled by our lungs, the keeper of our eyes, <br />Reveals to us the day as we rise out of our secret dreams <br />He soon has us forgotten.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sun-18/
