Eleventh Hour

In the gray city night,

we stretch, tall lamps lost in fog

above barren streets.

We spread our muffled light

in triangular patches

through mist that moves

in the wind like snow,

blurring our bronze poles.

Above the low, late-night

murmur of machines,

our chilled metal boxes purr

the deadly hum of sleep—

sentinels whose lonely charge

brings our city peace.

 

Custodians, nonentities,

metallic as our kin,

so lofty on our poles,

we pause between duties

to watch the empty night lots

and silent, darkened houses

where humans dream.

 

Catalog librarian by day, Lyn C. A. Gardner coedits the journal Virginia Libraries. She’s had over two hundred poems, stories, and articles published or forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, the Green Knight Press anthologies Legends of the Pendragon and The Doom of Camelot, Challenging Destiny, Talebones, The Leading Edge, and more. Two stories and a poem earned honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling); four poems were nominated for the Rhysling Award (SFPA).