Winter Light – David Hay

November 11, 2025

The garden of heavenly sleeplessness
calls my winter bloomed name.
In death I am born,
in sorrow’s bones does joy weave 
its electric flesh around.

In the open mouth of sunrise 
do dreams coal coated
burst with inner flames
to rise unbound by earthly strife.

Insomnia is cruel when you can’t
find the grace to face it.

 

Red Flowers

 

A bridge burns a far sky
through a mountainous dream,
singing light and shape to sound.

The sorrows that bury the longing eye
into the heartening silence that once ruled
tastes a smile,
and spits it back out.
The body quakes with medieval desire.

The sirens do nothing but
let the dead know they are lost.

 

The End of a Journey

 

Over the mountain rusts a collapsed bridge.
In the summer the heat burns the river orange.
A stranger to this place enters the site of the river
through a wall of pine trees.
He heads directly to the remains of the bridge.
On his back he carries a corpse like a backpack.
The few birds that inhabit the area flock to him,
as if he were their mother.

The Sky has an epileptic fit, 
it changes colour as his heart beats.

The birds whose feathers shimmer like an oil spill
rest upon his head and shoulders.
A few unlucky ones ride the head and shoulders of the corpse.
Morning fights over the scraps left by evening.