Robin Helweg-Larsen

The Sun is Always Setting

The sun is always setting, always setting on your day;
you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away; 
do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn?
Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?

The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled;
but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world:
it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land,
and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.

The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds
are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds;
and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set,
and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.

The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice;
I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.

Anglo-Danish by birth but Bahamian by upbringing, Robin Helweg-Larsen has been published in Alabama Literary Review, Allegro, Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, Pulsebeat and other international journals. He is Series Editor for Sampson Low’s ‘Potcake Chapbooks – Form in Formless Times’, and blogs at formalverse.com from his hometown of Governor’s Harbour.