Alexander’s band

(for Rosemary)

The darkness between two concentric rainbows.

An absence of light, not for of a lack of illumination there,
but because all the photons in-between are busy elsewhere
being someone else’s rainbow.

The parted shores of color, separated by an apparent chasm,
must have puzzled and inspired our precocious ancestors
long before we had a word for allegory,
long before a disciple of Aristotle committed them onto writing.
And here we are, more than two millennia later, discovering again
a rarer miracle of rain and sun,
    a beauty of absence,
    a beauty of partings,
    a beauty of giving away for the sake of someone else’s brightness.

You call me to such beauty.
You call me to beget light, unseen and unknown,
knowing it shall not be wasted,
knowing someone that I will never meet
will receive it in another lifetime,
knowing that even if we stand in the darkness
that bridges the inevitable days of Joy,
we will not be alone.

Two droplets of light
scattered off the same drop of rain
to meet in a distant horizon
part of the same distant rainbow.

Melih Sener