Light Bath

Light Bath

Pale as beeswax the moon the rock of rhythms

Counts time in the ebb and flow of the tides;

As the earth revolves in oval around the sun,

All these charted changes go on in calendar;

But every age is bathed in its own light;

The revolution had its oil lamps with thick wicks;

The guillotine beheaded in the light of Chinese lanterns;

The old gas torches had a butterfly flame;

Vienna was ghostly in the gloom of gaslight jets

That brushed the trees with yellow light;

But for lovers on the town night became a festival;

The cigarette lighter roasted fingers over a low flame;

Electricity served the goal of universal illumination;

Pale pearly moon bulbs lit up streets and rooms;

The perjured eye saw the holes in lovers’ shoes;

They were free to close their curtains on the sun

And seal up the innermost spaces of the soul;

The light was reflected in stretched ligaments of wood;

Using mannequins Nadar photographed Parisian catacombs;

The crowd from the boulevard were moths to the flame;

The camera snapped the phases of Venus passing the sun;

The photo flash startled the eyes of personalities to exposure;

Now artists had no choice but to torture paint to the point of absurdity;
Guernica pleas for the flash of civilised moral consciousness.