Sleeping in summer, the stars of winter night
Blaze with a cold clear blaze in his dull dreaming.
Sirius arises, the hard-to-see hare,
Lepus, lies plain at the feet of Orion,
Bright as Taurus, Auriga and Cassiopeia,
In the untinted ink of a sun-deserted sky.
Who would prize those months of midnight haze
Over the cold crispness, when the air catches
And bites cleanly, steaming as it leaves the lungs
Like the breath of the dragon, wound between the lesser bear
And the greater? He groans for it, stewed in his night-sweats,
Suffering his sky-lack, his star-thirst.
Meantime, at four in the muggy morning
The day’s dawned a dull blue-grey.
Sometimes I dream in verse, but all that ever seems to leave me in the mornings is a few maddening, strange fragments of poetry. This one is the other way around – a dream I had one extremely hot, muggy summer night, where I hadn’t seen the night sky for days, and which I worked into a poem when I woke up.
Since then, I’m glad to say the sky has cleared a bit, and I recently spent a pleasant hour stargazing in the middle of a dark cricket pitch. During that time I learnt a few new constellations and spotted one of the Aquarid meteor shower streaking through the southern horizon, so it hasn’t all been as bad as the poem makes out.
A Fool Grows Wise 