A Life in the Day
A Poetic Inquiry
Listen Here: Podcast Style
The night is just a part of the day.
Paulo Coelho
A Day in the Life is a five minute and thirty-five second song by the Beatles and was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The opening and closing sections of the song were mainly written by John Lennon with Paul McCartney contributing the song's middle section. The exotic mystical and metaphorical flowing humming feeling created by Lennon blends into the up and down rhythmical rhyming foot tapping brilliance of McCartney. The song then moves back to Lennon, who guides the orchestral magical tripping spiritual experience through a final crescendo into an unforgettable forty second meditation of a four way collective E Major chord to close the song. Waiting for McCartney to jump back in, I walk away wanting more!
A day in the life. Dawn and dusk. The bookends. Light and dark. Day and night. In the quest of understanding we always named things and gave them an order. What really came first? Do we even know? Is it day than night than day, or is it night than day than night? Are they really even two different things? Dawn and dusk are both unforgettable meditations that are born out of the universal orchestral crescendo of a day. Both just keep blending into each other within the never ending flow of existence. I walk away wanting more!
This poem is a lament for a day and a life that seems to go by so fast. A day content to only just be present while at times as a life I try to slow her down and hold on to her past forgetting that it doesn’t really end.
Nothing is born and nothing dies. Matter never disappears. Everything blends in to everything. We were always here. Everything just continues on in a different form. I walk away wanting more!
A day in the life. A life in the day.
A Life in the Day
The purple leaves lean hard
towards the calling morning light
Overflowing the shallow pot
Kissing the glass
that keeps them inside
All shamrocks are clovers
yet not all clovers are shamrocks
I pour the water in slow
Skies change
and the light shifts.
In the retreat of radiance
I know you were here.
I taste you inside the coffee
still warm on my skin.
You burned me
yet you never left a scar.
I bled for you
yet I cannot find the wound
to caress.
In the small cracks
that can only be forced to open
I gave myself away to you.
Reaching out a hand
to something that could never hold me.
Something I could never keep hold of.
You kept moving.
I stayed still.
I lost you.
In the advance of the shadows
regret is a ghost
that comes back to collect its toll
in the haunt of ageing bones
that want to remember
the very same things that you forgot.
Where did you go?
Outside the window
the leaves lean hard
into the dusk of night
Overflowing the earth
Kissing the sky
that never needed to name them
as the darkness came calling
to invite them back inside
© Jamie Millard
Thank You so much for reading.
An audio podcast style version can be found at the top of this article.
Lots of Love
Jamie
Dawn and dusk as bookends. Wonderful imagery! I loved this article so so much! The poem is beyond beautiful! Goosebumps. I wish you a wonderful life I a day today. 🙏
We want to hold on to what we perceive are the good parts of the day. The Beatles song was a mind-bender, taking an ordinary day and making it into an experience of discovery and then letting go.
We humans have a hard time letting go. I found in your poem a beautiful expression of that thought.