Katrina Kaye

This gift, bestowed to you
in flashes of lightning upon brittle twigs.
Your father’s fist in your mother’s womb,
we gave you light for the first time.

Children,
you took this spark and ran with it.
What started as two infants
warming themselves beside the fire of Eden,
erupted into a string of florescence
that hide the heavens man once learned to count by.

You drew a line between Mother Earth and Father Sky
with a shield of stinging light,
a golden fleece covering my body from his stare.
And I haven’t seen the stars in years.
I missed the way your father gazed at me,
embedded me in a black comfort
even before I birthed you from my seas.

We haven’t touched in a millennium.

But I still like to look to him once in a while,
reflect his eye blue skies in crystal lakes you’ve yet to soil,
count the stars he scattered into the letters of my name years ago.

I never thought our children
would push us so far apart.

We never conceived as we cradled you from crib to crawl
the tear that would come between our horizons.

The first time we allowed you
to stay up all night,
reading by candlelight,
you properly thanked us
by charting nebula and plotting the
position of planets.

You wrote an ode to your mother,
stung tinsel of gold around my belly,
to radiate against the fall of opaque sky,
but I am no longer the center of your universe.

This gift,
intended to shield you from the pitch,
keep the monsters at bay, warm your feet,
you manifested into a weapon.

You tended a minor glow, fanned your flame
into a storm across my body,
unstoppable,
until I can no longer be seen by father’s bedroom stare.
You made an artificial day of my favorite midnight.

Were you jealous of the way he touched me,
the lightning jagged and curl that connected us for a split second?
Or was it your fear of the darkness,
of the unknown, of death,
that made you wish away the night’s sky.

That made you think you could battle it
with 24-hour convenience stores
and swing shifts and nightclubs.
Distract the view of Milky Way with glowing neon.

You are destined for self-destruction,

Now, I never sleep,
and all my gentle warnings are wearing thin.
I haven’t been able to see past you in years,
you’ve seeped into every sky I’ve ever known,
infiltrated my blackest reserves.

You are too damned bright.

I thought you would fill the gap between us,
I wasn’t expecting you to shield him from me completely.
I search for him in deserted lands
far from your touch,
Africa, South America, Siberia,
among the open plains and mountain tops,
where the night still knows secrets.

Where no synthetic light will keep me up
or blind me from his constellations,
where I can still remember the name of the
creatures he conjured for my entertainment.

Children,
there are good things that happen in the dark,
and what this mother wouldn’t give to feel father’s embrace
one more time.
For one moment,
stop pumping your fists
against your father’s nocturnal mood.

We all need some time in the away from the light.

It is time to put these children to bed,
so this mother earth can once
again be enveloped in her father sky.

Take a moment,
slip into slumber
and don’t turn to me
when I slide into your room
and turn off that light,
reclaiming all I gave you.

“Light Pollution” is previously published under the title “Electricity” in Roi Faineant (2022).