Gaunt, hoary wraith! A traveller adrift,
you float across the Stygian vault of heavens,
tinged on the back by dying twilight rays.

The time has come for fraying into wisps,
but Night’s forgiving breath will help you forward,
and a joy it is to fly another night —

to breathe the bitter fragrance of the woods,
to see the Moon in her enthralling splendour,
to sense caressing eddies of the breeze,

perhaps, to muse. The Moon has chiseled out
leaves on a branch, a silhouetted jackdaw,
its outline made of silver. Time, no doubt,

reduces all to summary: start-end,
two ends in fact, linked by a fuzzy spindle
hollowed of substance as its time is spent.

Once form and substance travel side by side,
art is a tincture of eternal motion
and a joy it is to write another night.