Signs Of Life

Another poem by Tania Stokes, winner recently of the 2018 Peter Dix Memorial Prize for Poetry.

Signs of Life

One night,
I found myself under the stars.
I was alone
But for the brief flashes of cars
All driving home.

Always, the night hummed softly,
Engines revving somewhere else.
Under each orange spotlight
The faint buzz of lithium
Kept silence from waking.

The night grew strange

When the last pair of headlights
Melted away out of sight.
An absence reigned,
And the orange noise flickered
Down to nothing.

Sometimes
The quietest place in the world
Is by a road.
Silence, like an owl’s wings, unfurled
Into a shroud.

A remnant of the Rapture,
I walked in the white moonlight
And Debussy came to mind;
When the last bars drifted off,
I had been left behind.

The feeling grew

As I looked to the night sky,
Afraid I’d been forgotten.
I searched all through
The pattern of the heavens
To find the truth.

Though slight,
A sadness I could not describe
Came over me.
Somewhere, too far away from us,
There might be life.