From William Blake’s Night – it is a longish poem so I won’t repeat it all here but the first verse is charmingly descriptive :

The sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest.
And I must seek for mine.
The moon, like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
with silent delight
Sits and smiles at the night.

How lucky was he to anticipate the night with such equanimity. The nightly tortures of the insomniac would have a very different take on the coming of darkness with the inevitable restlessness.

Once when I couldn’t sleep I wandered around and looked up at the clear starry night and wrote :

I looked up and saw stars tonight; they were so bright and clear.
What is up there, I don’t know, but this I hold quite dear:
That all is well as long as they are shining in the sky.
The velvet cloak of night enfolds and all I ask is why –
Why does humankind not follow the zigzag paths of youth
To find the answers to our quest for some forgotten truth?

I looked up and saw stars tonight as sleep eluded me.
On distant stars, I pondered on what elements might be.
What don’t we yet know? How we yearn to fill in all the blanks,
But it is how we deal with these that keeps me coming back
To why we are and how the wise just offer up their love
With constancy and honesty – how much our lives improve.

I looked up and saw stars tonight, then one fell through the sky,
What power I can only guess, sends light to feast the eye.
To sit and ponder in the night, to think to hope to pray,
So that we might be happier at the opening of each day.
We are so small against this web of infinite space and time.
Some look and note the fact of it while others make a rhyme!

Very best wishes  – Denny Bradbury