The Night Garden

These summer days not merely wilting
hot and humid, but torrid, as the
fierceness of the late-season sun sends
its flares into that vast yawning chasm
in space, where we orbit. The nights
barely bring relief, but it is there, once
we step outside the shell of our homes.

During the day we tend the gardens,
water the parched plants, snip herbs
for our dinner salad plates, admire the
form, textures and colours of our gardens
and their tangle of flowering plants
before the fierce blaze sends us back
to those bland, air-cooled interiors.

At night, venturing out under the dark
cloud-free dome of the sky, looking up
and beyond, the starry members of the
exclusive solar system club fixate us.
Their cool brightness casts itself upon us.
Night breezes caress bare shoulders.
The grass underfoot is damp; plant
leaves daintily cup the evening dew.

The garden statuary stand remote and
still, white in the dim starlight, emulating
life, but rigidly posed, a conceit of the
past, of human nobility. The shapes and
colours resident in the garden , however,
come alive, mesmerize with their beauty
as night releases their heady fragrance.