Tonight's Poet Corner: Dusk Walk

Dusk Walk
by Belinda Roddie

As the coronal mass
ejections color
crayon pastel hues
into the pink and yellow blues
of a crystal diamond evening

you stop
to pluck a wilting ember
from a suckling vine

and drip the honeysuckle
onto the corners of your
weeping lips.

The dryness of the air is haunting
some membrane of your past life,

a life where you drank cider
under birch trees in
a summer sauna,
stunned by the
parched grass while your
son played cricket on the scorched dirt
near the playground that rusted from
your ample memory lane.

And the only cold air
comes from your wife's mouth
before she coughs into a
kerchief speckled with
tiny particles of aurora dust
that hangs in the night sky
and shuts down each street light
on your walk home.