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Night Sky at Lake Abanake, a poem by Nancy Pulley


Night Sky at Lake Abanake

by Nancy Pulley

We awoke at 3 in the morning
walked out after rain to see the black sky
and stars all over as if some God
had stumbled with a treasure chest.

Straight from sleep, I rose up
into the vast map that slaves
used to steer themselves to freedom.
My head still wrapped in mist,

the mystical road stretched above me.
I tried to open my eyes wide enough,
to open my mind, to waken
the sleepy spirit,  bring light down

through the lens of understanding, suck it
into the black hole of consciousness,
name the glorious, the lucid,
the spectacular common light

that beams forever overhead,
exists as I want to exist; vast, at the edge
of knowledge, far from normal.
I became dizzy and at the same time

as centered as I would ever be,
confused about my place in a dazzling universe,
yet eager to start some ray of light
across the inviting darkness.

Bio: Nancy Pulley is a graduate of Indiana Central College—now the University of Indianapolis. Her poems have appeared in The Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, Humpback Barn Collection, A Linen Weave of Themes, and The Tipton Poetry Journal, as well as other journals and publications. She was a recent recipient of an Indiana Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant in Poetry. Nancy has published two previous chapbooks. In 2014, her first full length poetry book, Warren Avenue, was published by Chatterhouse Press.