©Judy Bebelaar, 2019
(Guggenheim Museum September 7, 2014 James Turrell Aten Reign)
Light falling
from 18 billion years ago
from stars
or from stage lights
light cascading down like rain,
like a blessing.
My heart beats more slowly as the soft blue
deepens shade by shade
into royal blue at the lowest tier
of the rotunda’s ascending spheres
and already the light falling
from the highest sphere in the dome
is now rose,
becoming warmer as it spills
from each ring of light
and my breath quickens,
my heart pumps time away
faster
and yet here we are
in a realm without time,
mesmerized by gold now
into peach and the world outside
with its racket and clatter,
its cursing and spitting
less real than the light falling all around
like the light near water,
we silent watchers bound
to one another by the falling light.
©Judy Bebelaar, 2019
Judy Bebelaar’s award-winning poetry has been published widely. And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown, nonfiction, has won four awards including two first prizes in different categories from Royal Dragonfly Book Awards and a first prize in the 2019 Northern California Publishers and Authors contest. Judy and co-author Ron Cabral were named SFPL Library Laureates, 2019 for the book, and it was one of five nominees for a Northern California Book Award in nonfiction.
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