Solstice

The sun was a tyrant.

Noon-eyed, lidless,

gorging on rooftops,

pinning foxglove and sparrow

to the hours like dead specimens.

A scream of light, white as bone.

The sky, a taut drum

too thin to hold its silence.

I moved through it,

a wax figure,

sweating my own shape

into the furniture.

Water turned sullen in glasses.

The walls hummed.

Even the flies seemed crucified

on the pane.

And then, snap.

The thunder cracked its knuckles

over the roof.

Rain came like fury,

stinging, sacred,

slapping the earth with its wet hymn.

Not comfort. A reckoning.

I stood in the dark

at the window’s throat.

The garden was a soaked manuscript.

Each flower, a line struck through

and rewritten in silver.

What had been parched

now opened its mouth

and drank.

There is something exquisite

in a world returned to itself.

Not changed, but revealed.

The long light lies

and the dark tells you

what you are.