Dusk

Alone, watching the empty sky,
an abandoned turquoise plain.
Who threw it open, poured a dye
on the earth, color of a whiskey stain?
The Georgia summer sketched in charcoal.
Scratch in the flinching bats. A train
in the distance mourns the sun’s buried coil.
Fireflies pulse. Here is their love.
A bird tramps the leaves. The soil
crawls with howling insects. Now above
the rising moon could be hollow. The sight
recalls, with a shock, what you had dreamed of:
An unknown ancestor, delirious, dying with the evening light,
held out a hand to you and said: Here. Take it. Here is the Night.

Bryan Edward Helton is a poet and fiction writer from Georgia, USA. His work has been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, and The Collidescope. He is at work on his first collection of poetry and his first novel. A former juvenile delinquent and high school dropout, he has never attended university. He earns a living driving a forklift for a logistics corporation.