The night has enormous ears,
many more than there are stars,
amorphous as unformed glass.
With light or without,
its eyes existed before creation,
staring into its own darkness.
Its emotions are born in its stillness,
every movement struggles
in its wandering.
The night hears past and future,
what is alive and what has died,
in a chaos without boundary.
Where we are, poor excuse for hell,
casts its sky like a net,
in a wish for understanding.
The night hears squirrels
rummaging for food in bare autumn trees,
wolves summoning the moon.
It hears the cat’s methodical footsteps,
it hears ghosts chanting
at the feet of our beds.
The night is masculine as fire,
feminine as blue dust,
it is parent and child.
Do not wake and shout
at the void, neither speak.
This is not the night’s desire.
It hears cries and laughter,
weighs them without judgment,
turns its head away, musing.
Harmony and dissonance,
well up in wild song,
in desperate conversation.
The night exists without ending,
it can hold every sound ever made,
it is an imagination unimaginable.
It returns what it has heard
to planets, stars, the mighty, the frail,
those who speak with certain faith.
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