Night... time for savouring the silence, melancholy, reflection and loneliness. The passing moments linger on and everything seems to slow down as if time stopped to take a long breath before another day begins. It is the time in between, when yesterday disappeared under the veil of the darkness and tomorrow is still far away in the distant future of a new day.
It is time to step into another world where the darkness shrouds the ordinary streets into a mystery. There is something haunting about a solitary walk along empty alleyways, from deep shadows into flickering light of the streetlamps, where all the footsteps died out and all the voices disappeared in the distance. Where all you can hear is your own heartbeat and where you can get lost in your thoughts, far away from the distractions of the ordinary life.
Night time night time
Day left an hour ago
City light time
Must you get ready so slow
There are places to come from
and places to go
Joni Mitchell
Stairway stairway
Down to the crowds in the street
They go their way
Looking for faces to greet
But we run on laughing with no one to meet
Joni Mitchell
Well, it’s a marvellous night for a Moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush
One more Moondance with you in the moonlight
On a magic night
Van Morrison
I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.
Anne Brontë
White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest
So wonderfully built among the reeds
Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds,
As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
White water-lily, cradled and caressed
By ocean streams, and from the silt and weeds
Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds,
Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest!
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky;
I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets
Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting
In air their unsubstantial masonry.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Winds in the east
Mist coming in
Like something is brewing
About to begin
Can't put me finger
On what lies in store
But I feel what's to happen
All happened before
Pamela Lyndon Travers
The morning has not yet begun, the lights are low and the darkness prevails. The night tide is silently creeping in. Distant footsteps are echoing in empty streets.