SDL Original Poetry
In the hush between day’s last breath and night’s first sigh, I lift a chalice of ink to your waiting mouths. Drink, and follow the darkening river of syllables to where Our Common Nightingale keeps vigil.
Listen— its throat is a lamp trimmed with sorrow, its song a filament of silver unspooling through bramble, through bone. Every note pries open a door between your ribcage and the unseen field where longing grazes like pale deer.
Do not fear the corridor without torches. Desire glows fiercest where shadow crowds in: lips taste sweetest when tremoring over the edge of refusal, and terror is only love wearing its thorny dress. Let the forbidden bruise your tongue; let the bruise become a blossom.
Write, then, with blood-warm ink. Let verbs grow fangs, let nouns undress, let metaphors flare like startled bats flinging velvet silhouettes against the moon. Weave stanzas that snare the pulse, labyrinths where every corner sighs or shivers.
For the Nightingale circles above us, wing-beats stitching a seam between earth and elsewhere, carrying the unsent letters of the heart. Answer them. Bend your quills to the dark like reeds in midnight water, and loose a storm of syllables so lustrous that even the graves will lean closer to listen.
Come, kin of ink— let our poems be the silver path over black water, an incantation to wake the sleeping, a chorus that wrests the ordinary from its husk.
Night is here. The world tilts its ear.
Sing!
