Summer solstice

It is the day of the long sun.  All evening it has been young, it has been early although the clock ticked its time away and now, as I put my house to bed, there is still enough light to linger in the garden and wonder at the pale sky.  When I lived in Scotland it was never black in June, just a hanging grey as I drove home in the middle of the night.  It doesn’t seem right to ignore it, to tuck myself in to sleep as if any other night, as if there will be night and not a sandwich of day. 

I must sit and watch the orange rim fade and the turquoise blue thicken, holding us in an eggshell, holding light behind the dark shape of trees that are as still as a photo.  The only movements I can see are planes winking as they pass overhead, drinking in the blue, echoing through it like fish in a silent sea, and an occasional moth blinking its wings at the light.  Others are up, I can hear their noises and voices, cars and coughs circling the land.

Is there magic in the nearer sun, pulling our strings like a full tide?  Are we beached and birthed by it, drawn into the song that is summer as it laps at the shore of each cell and surges in the streams of our blood?  Can we know the heart of it, launched into the blue to follow the sun, or are we marooned in the clay of our body, just feeling the ripples as they turn and run?