The Last Sunset in Barrow, Alaska
Matthew Burns
(two weeks after the election)
We’ll subsist on spruce tea
and satellite TV
for sixty days. Work will come,
and we’ll look to the sky.
But day must rise
in another dusk, and night
in some weird red light.
This town is a synonym
for carrier, hod—something
to heft something heavier than us—
and the night is a weight. We know.
It will be dark for days
and days that will feel
like a sheet of ice
fifty meters deep. The wind
is a movie we’ve all seen;
it weighs on everything.
The long dark is another
stack of bricks; a wide lead smock.
But yet this: my chest
and belly: somehow, again,
warm and adrift. The TV is on,
and the warm cup of the sun,
the day, will—it must,
I believe—come again.
Matthew Burns teaches writing and literature in upstate New York. His poems have won a James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, and have appeared or are forthcoming in RHINO, Posit, ellipsis…, The Raleigh Review, Camas, Spoon River Poetry Review, Quiddity, LimeHawk, and others.