Those Summer Nights: poem

By: Julia Nunnally Duncan

 

Those summer nights

neighbors must have thought it strange

to detect my father and me in our front yard

lying in folding lounge chairs and

peering at the sky to spy constellations—

Big Dipper and Little Dipper

and distant designs we could not name.

Lightning bugs flickered like stars in the blackness;

I reached and caught one,

its glow making my fist a lantern.

My father’s baritone words stirred the silence

and seemed to me,

like the voice of God and the stars,

to be everlasting.

 

 

Julia Nunnally Duncan is still a star gazer, now with her husband Steve and daughter Annie.  She enjoys writing about her western NC childhood in Marion, NC.  Her poems have been collected in two books At Dusk and An Endless Tapestry.  She is currently working on a third poetry collection.