Catch the Sun When It Falls

free verse poetry

the girl was a moon picking her teeth with stolen stars swallowing hydrogen spewing gold, illuminating from within, baring her teeth she shows you something greater than the sun flirting with shadows like puppets growing intimate on walls, camouflaged in the obscurity, she lives on the edge of the obsidian hue surviving madness and mankind telling stories in the quiet hours that take years to pass as the coffee-coated fog sets in the night is ripped from the sky the dark is on the brink of light and she is fading again into the nameless faceless monsters beneath the bed a woman of angry dawns, waiting to catch the sun when it falls

Where did this title come from?

I like reading the autobiographies of famous people in my downtime. I’m currently in the middle of three of them. The one with most of my attention is Carly Simon’s Boys in the Trees.

I grew up listening to Carly Simon; she is one of my favorite artists of all time. Her life has always been of deep interest to me.

So although I did purchase her biography More Room In a Broke Heart which is written about her by someone who worked closely with her — I wanted Boys in the Trees because this was penned by Carly, herself.

(If I’m gonna get the story I want it straight from the source.)

Anyway, I was reading chapter 17 the other night and it got to a part where she is now detailing the beginning of her infamously volatile relationship with James Taylor (another musical legend).

In this chapter, we start seeing the first cracks in his armor — his icy cold silent treatments.

(It’s well-known that once they divorced, James Taylor never uttered another word to Carly Simon again. My mission? To find out why.)

Carly states that she accepted his silent treatments as part of what made him who he was; she tolerated it. To reason why she did this she quotes Mark Twain:

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Carly then writes:

“Angry Dawns” once again!

This is what drove me to pen this poem.

Background context

I just wrote a poem about the beauty of the sky, and nature itself, when dusk becomes dawn and dawn becomes dusk. This time I wanted to focus on my inner night. I wanted to honor my own personal sunset.

There is a silent side of me, a woman who craves the 3 a.m. silence and the footprints of the spiritual world when the waking ones are sleeping.

There is a darker shade of me that comes out to play in private and is magical in her own right. She is the moon to my chosen sun. This was me shedding some metaphorically metaphysical light on her.

In my written words.

Thanks for reading ❤

©Linda Sharp 2024. All Rights Reserved.