The Sun, Mad Envious, Just Wants the Moon

out of the way. It knows that I tend to cling
to potential in the dark, that I am myself only
as I am beguiled by the moon’s lunatic luster,
when the streets are so bare they grow voices.
The sun has lost patience with my craving
for the night’s mass-produced romance, that
dog-eared story where every angle is exquisite,
and ghostly suitors, their sleek smells exploding,
queue up to ravish my waning. Bursting with
bluster, the sun backslaps the moon to reveal
me, splintered, kissing the boulevard face first,
clutching change for a jukebox that long ago
lost its hunger for quarters. It wounds the sun
to know how utterly I have slipped its gilded
clutch to become its most mapless lost cause.
Her eye bulging, she besieges me with bright.
So I remind her that everything dies. All the
brilliant bitch can do for me then is spit light
on the path while I search for a place to sleep.

Copyright © 2022 by Patricia Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 25, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Wow—this is how you know the diva named ‘depression.’ How you dance with it to keep it at bay. Virus variants, blustering supremacists, a country’s collapsing democracy, a dying mother—all of it combines to bring me back to just me and what seeks to defeat me. But, hallelujah! Whatever my pen can name, my pen can defeat. So, you just recall the story; you rewind it, simply; you let it sit there and do its necessary work. I wrote this in darkness. I emerged from a little less darkness.”
—Patricia Smith