Gray Twilight Zone
Alan Altany
Aging into the gray twilight zone,
a surrealistic surge of sacrality
with each secret sound of time,
growing old as a chronic fantasy
contrary to logic-riddled sanity.
All are aging, all will age
towards a vanishing point
where fear meets hope
and doubt upholds faith
among love’s intensities.
Being old is already in the young,
waiting like a sudden surprise,
a secret homeward migration,
an alchemy of soul-ward
sacred & profane momentum.
In the psychedelic, startling
color of an emergent gray,
harvest of all past palettes,
old aging is a blatant epiphany
hidden by naked distractions.
Oceanic and deeply silent,
an overture to disappearance,
truth of an ancient beauty,
aging as an absurd winter
when tropical flowers bloom.
Alan Altany is a partially retired, septuagenarian college professor of religious studies and theology. He has been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, high school teacher, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, among other things. In 2022 he published a book of poetry entitled A Beautiful Absurdity.