The Queen of the Night

Here is a wondrously beautiful reading of my poem “The Queen of the Night” by Jasmine Arch.

The Queen of the Night

Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments. Worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of.

—Mary Wollstonecraft

How enrapturing is the night
Whose darkness breeds eternity,
Whose voice of immortality
Speaks to me within dreams divine,
Othering me with ecstasies
Of incorporeal light

A noctilucent glamoury
Lures me to its vespertine life:
Flickering ghost-lights of fireflies,
Bioluminescent blue ghosts
Alive and luciferous;
The green-eyed cicadae, rising
From a grave-like sleep to sing
In swarms of unburied crypsis;
And the cooing aziola,
The watcher owl, watching
For what waits in the fading light

Seduced by night-music, nocturnes
Of unseen bewitchments, hypnotized
By wandering will-o’-wisp light
And its illusions of movement,
I trace its aerial secrets
Into the thickening darkness,
And as I creep deeper, deeper
Into the sylvan night, I find
A lifeless flower withered white

But as I watch the moon goddess
Rise sublime, I gaze with wondrous
Melting eyes as the lifeless flower
Stirs with life, night-sick and alive
It blooms beneath the moon’s
Luminous gaze of lustral light

Yet, under the spell of lunacy’s madness,
Not even the moon can appease
Such leafy malevolence—
A lunar-synthesis of Orphic
Metamorphosis She exists
In other light liminality

Diaphanously She dances
With Nature’s witchery, scenting
The haunted air as Her petals bloom
With moon-cancer, a fragrance like
Vanilla orchid touched by
Phantasmal light, an aphrodisiac
For nocturnal pollinators
That sleep by day and wake all night:

The long-nosed bat flittering
In fits of nectar ecstasies,
Skeletal-fingered wings glistening
In echoes of light, unfurling
Its demon-like tongue, numb, dripping
With opium on the moon-vine,
A Dionysian smile thick with pollen
Catching the moonlight like fairy dust

And the worm-tongued sphinx moth,
White-lined, untouched by the death-mark,
Unclothed by the white-witch ghost
Whose sole frailty is deathlessness,
Yet possessed by fay-wingèd night magic
Of the owlet enchantress black witch,
Swing-hovering the opening petals
In fear of what waits with death’s kiss:

In illuminated darkness She blooms,
Unveiling a pale, tendrilled creature—
On a single night Her white spider renewed,
Lustrous and twisted in delicious solitude

How enrapturing is the night
Whose darkness breeds eternity,
Whose voice of immortality
Speaks to me in dreams divine,
Othering me with ecstasies
Of incorporeal light,
And as I gaze deeper, deeper,
Ascending into visions sublime,
I melt away into the darkness
And become one with the night.