This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
If you woke up this morning feeling a bit “off,” the culprit may be Daylight Savings Time. Since 2007, March and November have become our current “fall ahead, spring back” markers. However, what made Daylight Savings Time official was an earlier April-October schedule and the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Today, many recommend doing away with the practice altogether. In today’s poem, “Nocturne on the first day of standard time,” Deborah Burnham has mixed emotions about the semi-annual changing of the clocks.
Deborah Burnham is the author of two published books: Anna and the Steel Mill and Tart Honey. She has won the Seven Kitchens’ Keystone Chapbook Series prize twice, for Still and Among Our Other Dead. She recently moved from Philadelphia to a small town—a lovely place, but she misses trains, busses, and sidewalks. For several decades, she worked at the University of Pennsylvania, advising and teaching students. While she doesn’t miss grading papers, she does miss working with students and talking about poetry.
A nocturne—a musical piece spotlighting evening—sets the scene for calm. As Burnham explains, “The poem was more or less a gift from an open window, yes, on the first day of the time change. A man with a beautiful voice was walking down the street, singing. That was the gift.”
In “Nocturne: on the first day of standard time,” Deborah Burnham, likewise, gifts us a poem and a wish: to see past anger, shadows, and diminishing light to the gold fans of gingkos. But, she wonders, is this vision always possible?
Here’s “Nocturne: on the first day of standard time,” by Deborah Burnham.
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A poem about the night should offer
solace at the end, and, on the way, a list
of images the dark assembles
for our pleasure: the drowsy swallows, light
fading on brick and granite, the passing
rain, the slow calming of the mind. So logically,
this poem should celebrate the early dark
our clocks insist on, shoving nature toward
its longest shadow, sending us indoors.
But I spend this Sabbath cursing shadows
that bleach the garden’s brightness, cursing crows
that quit their yammering at dusk — even
the solitary singer cruising 34th
Street, falsetto swirling "This Little Light
of Mine" then a segue to "When Night
Comes Down" syncopating hymn and lovesong
into one, drowning the distant sirens,
calming our angry minds that see death’s footprints
through the gold fans the gingkos spread across
the concrete, though he can’t know this
and likely wouldn’t care.
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Previously published in Philadelphia Stories
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That was “Nocturne: on the first day of standard time,” by Deborah Burnham. Thanks for listening
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
