The Street Light

A glass fruit upon a metal stem,
The circle’s guard in realms of hollow air.
Within its pupil, pulse and weary phlegm:
An amber nerve of midnight’s frozen glare.
It drinks the naught, giving the shadow birth,
Cleaving the ether into seams and cones,
To tame the chaos of the nightly earth
With radiance from its rigid, crystal bones.
A silent eye, nailed to the velvet height,
It lines the dark with "here" and "nevermore."
It filters electric water through the night
Into the palms of sleepers on the floor.
In iron hat, by tangled wires bound,
It gazes down, an inquisitor of stone,
Above the hushed and weary houses crowned,
Composing blue-tinged silence all alone.
In neon fog, its solitude remains
Colder and purer than the winter’s breath.
Light for itself—prophecy in chains—
In hallways of a prison-house of emptiness.
Upon a single, frozen leg it stands,
Waiting for peace to shatter and expire,
To ignite the stage of static, street-lit lands
Like a supernova under human fire.
But sleeping in the glare of day, it sleeps,
Unaware that genius marks its fleeting face,
While children, as the rushing current sweeps,
Declare: he is the essence of this place.




February 3, 2026
*Alice L. July*