History of the night

History Of The Night

Throughout the course of the generations

men constructed the night.

At first she was blindness;

thorns raking bare feet,

fear of wolves.

We shall never know who forged the word

for the interval of shadow

dividing the two twilights;

we shall never know in what age it came to mean

the starry hours.

Others created the myth.

They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates

that spin our destiny,

they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock

who crows his own death.

The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;

to Zeno, infinite words.

She took shape from Latin hexameters

and the terror of Pascal.

Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland

of his stricken soul.

Now we feel her to be inexhaustible

like an ancient wine

and no one can gaze on her without vertigo

and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist

except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

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