“To Face the Sun” Poetry by A. Kennedy

Adrian Kennedy prefers to remain nondescript.

Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz

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To Face The Sun.

I once wished to be submerged within the sun’s golden rays,
Never parting from it’s scorching light;
So long as I would glow beneath it.

To follow ones light so blindly
And ignite myself within their shadow,
Just as an aimless moth
Would search so desperately the brilliance of the stars,
Whose respect is not matched by a lamplight
Beneath the moon.

I wished to live as the summer leaves,
Painting the branches of a being less charming,
Unknowing of the horrible fate
That exceeds the confines of their control.

Browned from self-repentance, or mayhap remiss,
And fallen from one’s own tempered grip
I lie, chrispened from weakness
yet told only to believe.

But how could I know of such a fate
Having fallen
To give way for flowers of the coming season,
Only for them to wilt and fall to the ground once more?

Though one may feel forced to ask
what comes of the leaves having fallen?
Might they take their place among the dying beds
For the living to flourish?
Could that be enough to justify such a
sacrifice?

I once lay beneath my star;
To scorch and char my skin
But more so to discover
That the sun could not be the being I search for
For a lifetime under golden rays.

For glow as I may have,
and as bright as I would be
Never could I radiate beyond his own gleam.

Beneath scarce starlight and fogged pictures of the cosmos
Dimmed to invisibility by the selfish streetlights,
Gives shelter to the field mouse scampering beneath the dead leaves;
Or simply sprouting life anew among them.
I once wished that one lying beneath a star
That blinds them just as the streetlights do the cosmos
Could shelter me
Just as the leaves do for the mice.

But learned from lightless cosmos
And mice beneath the leaves
Is what one can make of hiding,
And the life one lives in diffidence.

And so I ask myself,
Having fallen to join those fallen before me,
If one must glow
At all?

Instead, might one
live as if
A leaf
will never again
brown?

Spring in our Valley

Is a man a slave to silence?
Or to one not granting him a voice?
For if only you taught me to love myself,
I could learn to love you in a similar fashion;

I’m seeing the end of your world in premonitions,
But like the dead dog on the highways margin
I can’t seem to avert my focus;
though my lens has dimmed to black,
and yours, charred from the semblance of the sun,
The embers of hell may still glow.

I’ve lay in bed for three days, and lament for five.
For spring has begun, and the lilies may bloom.
The bumblebees may sting,
But then they must die, my love.

I, one day, will forget your name.
I will, one day, forget to define myself by what I can’t forgive.
For when my memories leave me and your name becomes a lily once bloomed,
A sting once stuck;
I hope to remember that spring will begin

When winter ends.

The Poets’ Left Hand

It seems to me that the sun has simultaneously risen and set;
That ‘I’ no longer exists as simply myself.

I can not pick you back up from where we’ve fallen.
You are worth what life is,

But not through my eyes
known to greed.

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