As springtime opens further and further after a very hard winter, here is a poem that praises the light. In “Always Day,” I love how poet Edward J. Rielly makes sunlight tangible, touchable, and reminds of both its beauty and its strength.

Rielly recently retired after 40 years in the English department at Saint Joseph’s College in Maine and is now a professor emeritus there. His most recent book, in which this poem appears, is “Beautiful Lightning: Spiritual Poems in a Difficult World.” He lives in Westbrook.

Always Day
By Edward J. Rielly

We close nighttime,
put it away in a drawer.
It is all daytime between us
even when we taste sorrow,
feel the weight of years,
hear echoes we cannot
understand even when
we are quiet and listen.
It is still day, sun shining
in your hair,
warmth touching me,
a breeze carrying what
we only sometimes understand
but always feel,
like a leaf touching skin.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Always Day,” copyright 2019 by Edward J. Rielly, was originally published in Beautiful Lightning: Spiritual Porms in a Difficult World (Resource Publications/Wipf and Stock). It appears here by permission of the author.