On one of our final nights in Taos earlier this month, my husband and I went out to the patio of our rental house with some chair cushions and a blanket and lay down to stare at the gloriously black sky peppered with stars. It was an experience that we just can’t have living in the city with its street lamps and security lights, the same way that Taos offers us the daily wonder of sunrise and sunset that we so often miss at home.
This isn’t what this poem by Maggie Smith is about, but it’s what it made me think of—the “good dark” and how rarely we pause to acknowledge it.
“So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize
as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break...”
photo taken at sunset…