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Tim Carmichael Poem
Shadow Waters
The water-bearer leans his urn silently,
pours starlight over forsaken streets
where neon lights flash their final confessions
and shattered promises accumulate like rain.
Here in the reverse trickle of time,
where advancement is lost in its own reflection,
the era turns in, searching for explanations
in dregs of what we believed we'd gained.
Electric prophets air hollow gospels
while the crowds scroll through ghost lives,
each contact another strand that entwines us
to this tapestry of lovely despair.
The constellation turns above, unchanging
those very stars that once held out liberty
now witness us tumble into the labyrinth
we built from our own radiant ideals.
In tower suites and lower-level clubs,
the children of the future sell their souls
to algorithms who recognize their secret names
and dole them out in morsels, afterwards.
Yet, still, the water flows, unceasing,
carrying seeds of something not yet born
perhaps redemption sleeps in darkness
of this shattered, brilliant age.
The carrier's face away from us,
sloshing the future drop by drop
while we stand dry in the flood,
suffocating in our own lighted shadows.
Copyright © Tim Carmichael | Year Posted 2025
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Tim Carmichael Poem
I have carried this fire within me
for longer than I can remember.
It warmed strangers on cold nights
lit pathways for those who were lost
consumed letters I should not have kept
and showed me my own face
when I had forgotten who I was.
Today I feel it dimming
not with sorrow
but with the quiet
that comes to all things
that have burned faithfully, fully
without reserve.
The fuel that fed it
passion, youth, the fierce belief
that I could change the unchangeable
grows thin now
like oil in a lamp at dawn.
I do not call this defeat.
The fire taught me what it came to teach
that light given freely multiplies
that warmth shared returns as love
that even in burning
even in consuming all we are
we become something the world needs.
Now the flame grows contemplative
no longer leaping toward the stars
but settling into ember, into glow
into that deep red patience
that asks nothing of the wind.
I think of forests that burn
so new trees may rise from ashes
I think of a candle melting to nothing
having lit a hundred others
I think of the sun itself
burning at the center of all things
never once complaining of its slow expenditure.
This is the wisdom of fire
to give until there is no more giving
to illuminate without counting the cost
to transform and be transformed.
And when at last the final spark
releases itself into the air
to trust that what was light
becomes something else
something equally necessary
perhaps memory
perhaps inspiration
for another soul
who will tend their own flame in their own time.
I am not afraid of this ending
The fire has shown me how to burn
and now shows me how to rest
Both are sacred. Both are needed.
Let the ashes cool in their own time
Let them settle soft as prayer
Let them nourish what comes next
For I have been the flame
and the flame has been enough
I have lit my small corner of darkness
and the darkness, in its kindness
has held me gently
while I burned
Copyright © Tim Carmichael | Year Posted 2025
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Tim Carmichael Poem
They gave the thunder to a lesser god,
a bearded man who hurled his bolts in rage
and made of lightning some dramatic show,
but Jupiter was never so small a thing.
Before the Romans claimed you for their king,
you turned without them. Long before their wars,
their olive trees, their Senate, and their gods,
you gathered all that cloud and made it yours.
You are the oldest argument in the sky,
the one that almost won. Had you grown just
a little heavier in those first cold years,
you might have lit, and we'd have lived in twice-sunned dust.
Instead you chose, if planets choose, to spin
in your own latitudes of rust and cream,
to wear your storm like a Victorian brooch,
that ancient eye older than our dream.
Four hundred years we've watched that single gale,
unchanged, unceasing, wide as worlds are wide,
a hurricane that has no shore to break against,
no coast to soften it, no tide.
What does it mean to rage without an end?
To turn for centuries and never slow?
The Earth has grief that passes. Ours conclude.
But you contain a sorrow we don't know.
Your moons are almost planets in their own right,
Io burning, Europa locked in ice,
Ganymede so large it strains the definition,
Callisto cratered past the edge of price.
You hold them all. You hold the whole middle distance.
Your gravity a moat, a catcher's mitt,
that draws the wandering stones away from birth.
How many strikes have you absorbed for us?
How many rocks consumed in our defense
that might have found us in our soft beginning
and left the whole interior world entombed?
We do not thank the things that silently save us.
We never see the accident that missed,
the rock that curved away into your keeping,
the history of all that might exist.
You owe us nothing. You were never kind.
Your mercy is a math, a mindless tending,
the accident of mass and of combined
trajectories and forces old as chaos,
as old as dust that sorted into spheres.
You did not love us. You were simply there,
and we were simply lucky. All these years.
So here is what I offer to the giant,
the one that wears the storm-cloud like a crown:
not worship, and not fear, but something stranger,
the gratitude of those you never let down,
who walk beneath a single unscorched sun
because your orbit fell the way it did,
who live inside a debt forever hid.
Turn on, great planet. Wear your banded colors.
Let your four moons run their ancient rings.
You do not need our watching to continue.
You were immense before we knew such things.
Copyright © Tim Carmichael | Year Posted 2026
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