After
After - meaning Summary
Absence Under a Quiet Night
The poem juxtaposes a quiet, starry night with social emptiness to explore absence and longing. In restrained, almost still images, the sky and birds carry a sense of continuity and beauty, while the market and streets reveal neglect and vacancy. The refrain of absence is embodied in the line about our absent selves weighing on the bed, suggesting a collective failure to be present, engaged, or alive to each other. The poem reads as a meditation on loss, personal or communal, and how absence shapes ordinary life as surely as night and silence do.
Read Complete AnalysesNo sound falls from the moaning sky, no scowl wrinkles the evening pool, the stars lean down a stony brilliance while birds fly. The market leers its empty shelves, streets bare bosoms to scanty cars, this bed yawns beneath the weight of our absent selves.
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