photo by Collyn Ware

We’re made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel color, and experience it.   ―James Turrell , American Artist

Twilight is often referred to as the golden hour, that magical transition from day to night, all the world bathed in lavender light. Even the word twilight sounds as lovely as it looks and feels. Artist James Turrell claims that this is the time during which we see best, that we can actually feel and experience color. Author Olivia Howard Dunbar writes that twilight is when the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.

Twilight is both gloriously of this world and yet not. Perhaps its greatest attribute is that it gives us a glimpse of what’s beyond earth and life, a glimpse into the sacred. I’m convinced–like James Turrell–that there’s something truly other-worldly about twilight and that I can feel color in these moments. I may be twilight’s biggest fan.

Twilight

When twilight comes,
it falls first in a familiar trill through the trees,
a silhouette of a bunting on a fence post,
a sweet sliver of blue light
that taunts the dusk.

It comes as a nether world,
where every mystery flickers across
the iris of time,
across the grasses which give up 
the last breath of day and welcome 
the first breath of night,
across deer who will bed in the timber,
their heads drowsy with dew.

It comes as a herald of dreams
once hidden behind a silken scrim, 
but backlit now,
they emerge like fireflies, 
like galaxies in the lavender light.

It comes as a whisper
that grows finer and lighter, 
its filaments fusing into a single cloud 
of witnesses.

And when it comes,
you spread your arms under the old oaks
which have dropped their crowns towards earth;

you pull the corners of the day 
around the lilies and the yarrow,
around the moths in the meadow,

while magic burns gold and true
across the hills.