Light and Shadow
You unfolded your wings with trepidation, as though I might look at their feathers–
dark as midnight, twinkling with specks like the night sky, and find them twisted, and step back in intimidation.
Where mine were of fire, and arrogance built in holy pyre and scripture that rose in spite of ire,
Yours were formed in shame, from the kind of parent who asked you to fly just to be held.
Both of us beat our wings like we might sing our way into the hands of those who should have loved us, held us, without working us into something that could be solved.
I admired them,
Your wings beat and sheen, the way they shimmered in the dark like twilight, offering something not warm, not cold, but something different.
Like the hands of a clock, mirroring the movements of time lost to the past: one counting seconds, the other hours, working in tandem, seconds, hours, years in synchrony.
We moved like the sun chased the moon.
One step forward, met with one step back.
Silence answered.
We moved to and fro like it was our favorite song.
Both of us paused, holding ourselves as though we were too much, too loud, too angry, too frustrated, too intense–
Worried the other would flinch.
Whether it be the flinch of the shadow receding into sunlight, or the twilight swallowing the sun.
But neither can exist without the other.
So much in contrast, so much shared–
like white space between poems, giving each breath and room to ache.
How do I tell you:
The gloom cannot exist without the dawn.
And the sun cannot rise or set without dusk.
And now
without you
it feels as though the night has become grief:
A sun burning in the sky forever alone,
Never setting into its dusk,
And the twilight never being warmed by the break of light.
The sun wishes to whisper to the night,
Let me wrap you in my wings,
Warm you– hold you against your own cold,
And the night
Can wrap her wings around the sun,
And cool him, soothe him, against his own fire.
Nathan Valentine writes from life experiences and clinical work, often feeling like he's lived one too many lives. A Californian by blood and a clinician by trade, his work threads together cigarette ash memories, grief-laced love stories, and the long road home he keeps swearing he’ll stop taking. His poems often explore masculinity, memory, rupture, and the sacred weight of what we survive.
