All The Sunlight Is For Laughing

If there were three Suns in the sky
people born illuminated
by the three Suns, the Trinity,
the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn,

would only know about the Sun
shining in the sky by itself
from the stories old people told
and would tell endlessly until

the people born under one Sun,
obsolete in a day-night way,
grew old, felt old, felt out of place
living with kids comfortable

talking about three kinds of night,
bright nights, Jupiter-Saturn nights,
twilight nights, brightened only by
Jupiter or Saturn, dark nights,

what old people always had called
real nights, on those convergences
when both Jupiter and Saturn
moved in the same sky as the Sun,

leaving that other sky, the sky
old people just had called the night,
dark for the Moon and stars to shine,
a reminder of a lost world,

of old people, old, dead and lost,
of change as illumination
as change in fact always has been,
illuminating the faces

of the young, laughing, the shadowed
faces of the old, turned away,
ashamed the laughter eludes them,
too tired to try to understand.