To See the Northern Lights Tonight

There may be a moment tonight
when I will be able to see the Northern Lights
without traveling far to see them;
though I do not mind travel to see things
I’ve not seen, or visits to places
with a single focus for the journey,
it is rare for the Lights to come this close to home
and I am ill tonight and in need of them.

I am not so vain to think of the Lights
as being staged for me.
It’s not as if I was made sick
to give me the night at home
and not as if I wanted this pain,
or believe that such a sight will heal me
and that this was preordained.

But I’m thinking a lot these days
of what is yet undone.  The words unsaid,
or said and unretractable.  The love not given
or reciprocated.  The lasting moments
that should have been immortalized
that now sit like unsprung bulbs
under a mile of concrete.

So to do this, tonight, seems
worth doing.  Worth dragging my body
out to see the coincidence that is a visit from the Lights. 
To go out, a little way out of my way,
and come back and be able to say something other
than “someday, I’d love to see the Northern Lights.”
I am eager to give them some other name
that comes to me upon first sight of them,
to invent my own language for that moment
and only then, perhaps, to nurse their bloom in another’s eyes.
To be knowledgeably immodest
and pretend not that they are here for me,
but that I am here for them,
and to pretend amid all the contrary evidence
that all that I believed was unworthy in me
can still be made worthy somehow.

I cannot just be here to miss them
when they are so close;
I cannot bear to keep thinking
that such an awful thing could be so.

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Tags: poems, poetry, death, hope, meditations