Night Emotions
By John Herlihy

Emotions brew
Like misty dew,
Filling the shadowy air
With scented herbs, extremely rare.
The night is passing with little time to spare.

The emotions come uninvited and on their own,
Wringing their hands like a solitary crone.
The day is for doing, setting emotion aside;
Nighttime awakens the spirit of wooing,
Leaving the passing day behind with the tide.

My father asked just before he died:
“Is there a heaven?” he quietly sighed.
Many years later, he appeared in a dream.
The smile on his face shining with a beatific beam;
He had come back to answer his own question.

My mother falling, and falling deep into eternal night.
She couldn’t remember me, but tried just for spite.
“Who are you,” she asked, her mind in flight.
“I don’t know your name,” she said and turned away.
“But I know you,” I had wanted to say.

My brother, paralyzed, unable to swallow.
“Is this my life now,” he had wanted to bellow.
Instead, he grinned mysteriously lying in bed;
Grim determination took hold of him instead,
Courage and fortitude inside him wed.

At night, we often remember,
What during the day we sometimes forget.
Emotions flood into the world of the night,
Leaving behind in their wake feelings of regret.
We accept them as they are, without feeling upset.

The emotions find refuge in certain corners of the mind;
The moon beams shed light in an effort to be kind.
Even the light of stars offer humbly their meager light,
For a while these raw emotions bask in a mysterious glow,
Hand-made arrowheads pierce the heart from a taut bow.

Night emotions make primitive etchings
On the cave walls of the heart.
They are here to stay; they will never depart.
They appear under the cover of night fully enveloped
What has taken a life and a lifetime to gather and develop.

Night emotions periodically wax and wane
They adopt the rhythms of the moon in night’s window pane
Their fullness and scarcity come to life to keep us sane
Before taking their leave before the first hint of dawn
Back down into the well from which they were earlier drawn.

Night emotions depart at the first light of dawn,
Rejoicing as they leave the ground they have walked upon.
They take comfort in the contentment they have extended,
During the long, ageless night when someone remembered.
Night emotions that in the moon’s soft light were tendered.