Luke Munson

to hide the sun for a day,

light a candle and complete the following
while it still burns: divulge a secret
to a stranger; teach a child a word she doesn’t know;
stand in three countries at once; replace
a traveler’s suitcase with a close copy;
introduce two species of bird
which have never met; convince a rich man
to give his money away. Do you feel that warmth
drifting? You’ve hidden the sun in your pocket,
fragile as an eggshell. All the world over,
the rest of us wake to nothing
but stars. We may go swimming,
or stay in bed. Old enmities abate,
and older ones resurge, like chronic pains
that illness leaves, even after healing. It’s a good time
for listening to the wind recall long, long agos,
when earth and water were undivided, no fire
and shadow flickering, only a stillness
within a single breath, something moving on the ground.

Luke Munson has an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis. His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Arcturus, and Mirage #5. He wrote and helped produce with the LA artists' collective Die Kränken a video play which was in exhibition at USC's ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in 2017. He lives in Northern New Mexico with his partner and their cats.

Luke wrote the following about ‘To hide the sun for a day,’:

I read Ben Lerner’s ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ in one sitting back in 2016. My immediate reaction to the book was annoyance, but it came to shape my understanding of the promises poems make, and how they both keep and break those promises. I wrote a series of magic spell poems with this broken/fulfilled promise structure in mind. This particular poem was written in March of 2020. Like a lot of people, I had been laid off from my job in retail. It felt strange, for a while at least, to have no external pressure to work.