Sleepless Night

I guess everybody has at least an occasional sleepless night. I'm having one tonight ... a night essentially without sleep.

At the moment, shortly after midnight, I'm in the midst of preparations for a medical procedure which is scheduled to take place early in the morning.

Just routine, but it does take prep, and, as I go into the home stretch on that, it looks like there will be little sleep before I report in.

Meanwhile, there's a new installment of "Squiggles and Giggles" (note the link on the left side of "Chosen Words") just waiting for visitors.

Today's poem addresses another type of sleepless night ... and is for all those nights before air-conditioning ... or without it ... when I was growing up, when I was in military service, later, in a rented room here and there ... and even later.

There were a lot of those.

It's for those lonely nights when a siren would signal the approach of flashing lights which would go dancing across the ceiling and splashing on down the street.

Once or twice that siren and those lights were for me. But "not this time ... old pals."

It's for the times I listened to the crickets picking up the threads of conversation in the darkness ... and I lay listening to the night ebbing away.

I don't dwell too much on the past, but it does provide the foundation for today ... and tomorrow. It does bear some thought. I try to give it that, and I'm glad when a poem results, especially when that poem eventually finds a good home. This one was originally published in Riverrun.

SLEEPLESS NIGHT

A sharp-edged siren

comes careening through

my open window, scant

warning of lights

that will go slashing

across my ceiling,

tumbling pell-mell

in the littered street,

spattering buildings

with fiery colors

that ooze and fade.

Not this time

for me, old pals.

Not this time.

Slowly, like strangers

waiting for a bus,

crickets pick up loose

threads of conversation,

and I lie listening

to another night

burning itself out,

the welter of chirrups

reeling in another

sweltering day.

© 2000

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Today's word: threads