Before Darkness Comes by M.J. Iuppa

After a day of rain, of sleep-walking room

to room, wondering what else can be made

with the last peck of pickles, twilight arrives

candling the sky with streaks of indigo

and deep pink— an invitation to step

outside before it’s too late . . .

Who can resist distraction? 

And so we go to the lake to walk

along its rain-dimpled beach that holds

Ontario’s stillness within its margins.

Only intermittent drips of rain falling

from the canopy of silver beech leaves

disturb this quiet, enough to make us look         

up and beyond our stopping—the slightest

slip of wave rinses over a cache of cobbles

unearthed in the storm— to relish all

that waits patiently to be noticed before

darkness comes.

M.J.Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario.  Between Worlds is her most recent chapbook, featuring lyric essays, flash fiction and prose poems (Foothills Publishing, 2013). Recent poems, flash fictions, and essays in When Women Waken, Poppy Road Review, Wild: A Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Andrea Reads America, Canto, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Poetry Storehouse, Avocet, Right Hand Pointing, Tiny-lights, The Lake (U.K.), The Kentucky Review, and more.  She is the Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College.  You can follow her musings on writing and creative sustainability on Red Rooster Farm on mjiuppa.blogspot.com.