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We started 2026 with a call for submissions that emerged while I was trying to find a poem that I believed was titled "Blue Hour." I thought I remembered a poem about the time of day when the light appears a bit bluer than at noon or sunrise or sunset.
The transition from day to night (and vice versa) is divided into several phases based on the Sun's position relative to the horizon. While we often use words like "dusk" and "twilight" interchangeably in casual conversation, they have precise astronomical and poetic meanings.
Dawn refers to the specific moment the Sun reaches a certain angle before sunrise. Dusk refers to the specific moment the Sun reaches those same angles after sunset. Twilight is the duration of time between these points.
Poets often use these times symbolically, just as they use the seasons. Dawn almost always represents rebirth, hope, "blushing," awakening, and the "white hour" and is optimistic or renewal-focused. Twilight represents aging, memory, the end of things, regret, and is melancholic or meditative.
More poetic terms for these times of day includes the "gloaming," a term with Scottish roots that comes from the Old English glōm, meaning shadows and twilight. It specifically refers to the evening twilight. Unlike the scientific "dusk," gloaming is an emotional term evoking a sense of quiet, soft light.
This time was thought to be a "thin place" where the veil between worlds is believed to be weakest. Also known as "Eventide,"in Celtic folklore, the gloaming is when the "Fair Folk" or spirits are most likely to appear.
While "Golden Hour" implies light, "gloaming" implies the creeping of shadows (glōm). Also known as the "Magic Hour" by photographers, this time occurs when the Sun is just above the horizon (roughly the first hour after sunrise or the last hour before sunset). The light is warm, soft, and golden because it has to travel through more of the Earth's atmosphere, which scatters the blue light and emphasizes reds and oranges.
All of this came from my searching for that "Blue Hour" poem. This time occurs when the Sun is just below the horizon and the remaining light is dominated by blue wavelengths, creating a cool, moody, and ethereal atmosphere. This blue light also occurs in the stillness of the early morning.
While the term "the blue hour" (or l'heure bleue) is frequently used by photographers, filmmakers and novelists to describe the twilight just before sunrise or after sunset, it appears in poetry with a specific focus on the stillness and liminality of the morning before dawn.
This liminal hour just before dawn was called by the ancient Greeks the “wolf hour.” I did find that poet Louise Glück used the term “blue hour,” and Mary Oliver wrote in her many poems about this almost-but-not-yet-light time of day. It is a threshold time when the world hasn’t yet decided what kind of day it will be. It's a kind of suspended moment.
Arthur Rimbaud is often cited as one of the first to use the phrase poetically. He wrote about "aux premières heures bleues" (at the first blue hours) in his 1872 poem "Est-elle almée?" to refer to the very early morning. The specific term "Blue Hour" didn't gain widespread popularity until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, heavily influenced by French Impressionism and later by the technical terminology of photography.
Most classical poets (like Wordsworth or Keats) preferred terms like "the grey dawn," "the gloaming," or "the rosy-fingered dawn."
I found a poetry collection titled Blue Hour: Poems by Carolyn Forché, and I found several poems with that title. but never found the poem I was remembering. Maybe it doesn't exist.
I spent a morning looking up all these terms and finding poems about the words we use to describe times of day based on the light.
I ended up writing a poem myself about that light that is sometimes called (as is my poem) "God Rays."
Here are three public domain poems that deal in some way with these "ages of the day" (a phrase I borrowed from Frost).
Emily Dickinson often used dawn as a metaphor for hope or the end of a struggle. In this poem, she describes some physical preparation for the day as light moves from fear to calm. Her smoothing hair and readying dimples are real starts to the new day, and night and its fright are reduced to a brief, fading memory.
When Night is almost done
And Sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the Spaces
It’s time to smooth the Hair
And get the Dimples ready
And wonder we could care
For that old faded Midnight
That frightened but an Hour
Her poem that begins "There’s a certain Slant of light," find the light of a winter afternoon to be heavy and oppressive.
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons – That oppresses,
like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes...
"Dawn," a brief poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, personifies a sleeping night and a blushing dawn.
An angel, robed in spotless white,
Bent down and kissed the sleeping Night.
Night woke to blush; the sprite was gone.
Men saw the blush and called it Dawn.
In this odd poem, "Flower-Gathering" by Robert Frost, a relationship moves from morning's glow to the grey gloaming, and the "ages of the day" are used as a metaphor for the changing relationship.
I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know?
All for me? And not a question
For the faded flowers gay
That could take me from beside you
For the ages of a day?
They are yours, and be the measure
Of their worth for you to treasure,
The measure of the little while
That I’ve been long away.
In "Clenched Soul" by Pablo Neruda and other poems, he often wrote of the "blue night" dropping on the world, and twilight is a time of loss and solitude.
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world...
Our February 2026 issue features poems that are concerned with a certain time of day - dawn, dusk, twilight, gloaming, blue hour, magic hour, golden hour, sunrise, sunset, or even one of the scientific names for the times of day. What can that time of day, or the passage to or from it be a metaphor for to you?
Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was a prolific yet private American poet. She lived a reclusive life at her family homestead, writing nearly 1,800 poems characterized by slant rhyme and unconventional punctuation. Only ten were published during her lifetime; the rest were discovered posthumously, cementing her legacy.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in 1872 and the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, was one of the first African American poets to gain national recognition.
One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry,Robert Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections. Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont and died in Boston in 1963.
SESTINA FOR EVENTIDE IN THE NEVADA DESERT
Wilderness time, only the length of shadows
time my day. In the heat of the desert
I wait for cobalt when the earth turns around
just enough so that the last golden rays are lost.
True blue sky sets the stage for the star
of the evening, that glorious Harvest moon.
Saturn appears first. On the next breath, the moon
floats up, an orange globe that pulls in shadows
of range over basin and dims the stars
to faint swirling sparkles over vast desert.
My mind spins in the gloaming, lost
in the reverie of year after year around
the sun.The year that turned my life around.
See, I was never the planet, but always a moon
held in another's gravitational pull until the loss
of my soulmate shattered my heart and cast shadows
of doubt. Why should I keep living when joy deserted
me in my final chapter? All was dark, even the stars.
I looked for him, my soulmate. He must be in the stars.
Peace settles after twilight, in the sapphire glow all around.
I learned to live in that stillness, hold in fresh desert
air as it cools and let the ethereal blue heal me. Tonight's moon
now bright above, wakes me back to the present; dark turquoise shadows
close in on the liminality between worlds of joy and loss.
Ancient petroglyphs carved on rocks, human figures like lost
souls, frozen in time with arms raised to the stars,
souls like me, sought comfort in the blue shadow
enveloping their world, my world, all around.
Bighorn sheep glow golden under October's moon
running on stone for millenia through desert
sage. Darkness descends gently, the desert
roses close. This evening, like all evenings here, is not lost
but embraced because in most of this crazy moon-
struck world, there is no blue hour, no stars
because people are too busy rushing around
collecting treasures for show in their boxed shadows.
Life slows under the desert night sky, blue darkens, stars
glitter; I get lost in my thoughts; on the rocks a round
full moon makes playful art with my shadow.
Leslayann Schecterson
FOGGY DAWN
Sleep of fog lies grey upon the roses,
fluttering wings of a mockingbird penetrates
the morning shadows, an all night bullfrog
croaks softly from the pond mist, waiting
for the penetrating sun so he can doze
the day, I sip my light browned coffee,
nibble the corners of a lemon tinted scone,
fog disappears as the first movement
of Vivaldi's four seasons paints the air
with vibrant violins and rebirth.
Peter A. Witt
US 81
Sometime soon, it better be, as my
fan belt is slipping badly at 70,
I’ll be on the road to Roanoke.
Northbound 81, the sun poking my shoulder,
straddling the Walker and Blue Ridge Mountains.
If I time it right for whatever season,
the road will rise a few miles
past Blacksburg and the setting sun will
push my eyes eastward into the valley,
and the trees will flame without burning.
I’ll be awash, at the end, as
I was so long ago, in holy light.
It will raise me up, as it did
so long ago, with promise and hope,
vague yet powerful, and I was invincible.
I took in the sun, as the
fields glinted around me, reflecting its light.
But that was then. I didn’t know
anything at that moment but the bliss
of not wanting anything else, anything more.
Rob Friedman
ON THIS COLD QUANTUM DAY
It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world
- Mary Oliver
Einstein did not accept
now or time or timelessness.
PastPresentFuture
all at once.
Is time a river
or a train passing?
Dawn, noon, twilight
don’t exist in spacetime.
I’m in a temporal superposition
as I write this
or in the chronoverse
or omnitime
or a timeless flux,
an eventide where
events collapse into
their observed states
the echo of all outcomes
and this poem weaves itself
on a timeloom
with threads of possibilities
on this cold quantum day.
AJ Reeves
TWILIGHT
The blue hours
have fallen upon me
the cobalt sky darkening
shade by shade
I sit here
under the arched logo
of McDonald's
sipping a Frappuccino
Yellow is not
the color of joy
nor is blue
the hue of sorrow
just something
to shut my eyes on
letting the horses take over
in the milky realm of dreams
then I wake up
to the pink cheeks of dawn
caressed by the sun
which one day
I will cease to greet
Jackie Chou
THE SALLOWING
The golden hour
The later one
Less gold; more honeyed
Twilight, dusk
After light but before dark
Really?
How can that be?
The sky’s gray area
That odd color
A strange yellow
Not sunshine morning yellow
Not Sundance yellow
That once shrieked from my bedroom walls
But old, faded paperback yellow
Yellowed cello tape yellow
The kind in black paper photo albums
Yellow like faded sofa plastic
And storefront window shades
And Grandma’s fly paper strips
Deathly ribbons twirling like mobiles
That yellow
Pasted over my windows
A jaundiced view of the world
Outside my door
A sickly in-between
Neither here nor there
A time meant for souls departing
I want to find the beauty in it
But it scares me
Its quiet eeriness
Its simply being
As in the moment before
The strokes of midnight
A stately clock
Chimes 12 times
I hold my breath
Until I am restored
Into the darkness
My breathing resumes
To a calm state
The eggy wash gone
From my vision
I am delivered
Terri J. Guttilla
MATUTINAL MUSINGS
a triple Ronka
I wake up to an antelucan sky
A Sun concealed by tall dark trees
Tries on outfits for the coming day
Discards hang on clouds and blackened branches
Assorted reds, deep blues and pale pinks
Not quite awake and fresh from dreams
I ask myself how should I dress —
Hope’s bright colors or despair’s dark hues?
Not knowing what the day will bring
I do not know how to prepare
Though clouds conspire to hide the Sun
And shadows claw at remnants of light
Day will come, no matter night’s recalcitrance
I rise to greet a nascent Dawn
Not knowing what she has in store
Frank Kelly
MEDITATION 12
Evening,
low humidity,
for a few days
here on the coast
in spring and fall,
it must be what it’s always
like in California—or heaven
(Heaven’s always distant
somewhere better).
Twilight, sun almost
due south, air easy on the nose.
A dog’s bark resonates in the
distance, traffic on the parkway
whines, an owl maneuvers
through the trees and vanishes.
Another year’s end, the earth
churning, no solid sea ice
in the Arctic yet in late November.
The sound of a prop mingles
with the sound of a dove and I
wonder if my daughter at my age,
on her own porch as evening falls
will sit in silence, watching,
listening.
Rob Miller
THERE'S NO TIME LIKE NOW
As Winter sun deserts the dying day,
The sky lies frozen, against a snowy hill,
Pale, sparse rays frame an aurora still,
To guide poor travelers on their way.
Our day, so soon, has passed and gone!
We saw the light, too briefly, from afar,
And in its stead is now the Northern Star,
Blinking bravely, where our sun once shone.
Early next morning, the sun also rises-
The beauty of a valley, silent, bare,
Glows radiantly in the sunlit air-
And greets a world of sweet surprises,
Of flowers and bees and new mown hay,
Replacing all grim yesterdays.
Time will awaken, new life will grow,
So utterly unlike the snow!
John Botterill
A HINT OF DAWN
Now you’ve been gone almost two years,
and still I lacked the words to tell –
your earthly force of energy transformed
to somewhere as the dust of stars.
The poem started, and like your life, cut
short. And yet a deep dark sleep
renewed it, so I woke still half in dream
to compose your ending in my head.
As the first hint of dawn – a pale grey silk
above the ridgeline, and the fields
below in black forgetfulness – I wrote
three lines of waking dream: our doing,
an angel loving our dust, our being.
Words enigmatic as another earthly dawn.
Taylor Graham
BLUE HOUR
The cold rains in
November, wipes
away all the yellow.
Shivering, I watch.
Blue hour.
That’s all we
can breathe for.
Blue hour.
It’s all the
hope there is,
all of humanity
that’s left.
No glimpse of a sun.
Nothing more than a shadow.
Shall my eyes scream?
Should my ears be left alone?
Maybe
my hands will freeze.
Oh,
shining light
at
Blue hour.
Vítor Souza
SUNSET
Hi, Mom.
There you are in the sky again,
minutes before darkness curtains my windows,
reminding me that despite your death,
you will never leave.
I see your anger, a birthday candle
that slowly becomes a wildfire blaze
of vermillion, fuchsia, marigold,
until it fades, as your ire did,
only to flare up again.
I can't forget the tears I shed,
yet on these winter afternoons,
I can't help looking to the west
with hope that I will find you there,
with hope that someday,
I'll forgive.
Susan Spaeth Cherry
NEVER AGAIN
Night
pales into insignificance.
Dawn blinks, burps,
and blushes a pale pink
as the Morning Star winks,
knowingly.
The tawny falls quiet,
creating space
for blackbird,
coal tit,
thrush.
The sun doesn't rise,
as such.
Rather, the Earth turns,
gradually revealing more
of our nearest
and friendliest
star.
This day
has never dawned before
and it will never
pass this way
again.
Robert Best
ONE WINTER DAY ON THE CALIFORNIA COAST
A seven-haiku sequence
Murky gray dawn rays
Melt the frost. A cat walks past
The bare cherry tree.
Lemons cluster in
Chill winter sunlight. Sparrows
Settle in the shade.
Salty clouds hover
Over the dunes at midday.
Pelicans circle.
Afternoon bird song
Twitters through the stillness. Pale
Light floats through the pines.
The sun shifts toward the
Sea. A distant bagpipe chants
Past the wild mustard.
Soft fog, live oaks and
Spanish moss surround our son’s
Cold burial place.
At Elk Horn Slough, tall
Plovers step past the mud hens
As the last light falls.
Rose Anna Higashi
MOONLIGHT REFLECTIONS
Let’s say it’s an August night
and you are awake
staring out an open window
marveling at the meadow,
lupines and butterfly weed,
brilliant
under summer’s barley moon.
And let’s say you walk outside,
follow the path towards the pond
where cattails crowd the water’s edge,
your thoughts succumb
to the midnight music
of katydids and crickets,
their mating calls.
You remember
a perfect moonlit landscape,
your youthful desire,
the longing, that ache,
always
a warm summer night like this.
Norma Ketzis Bernstock
SHEPHERDS WARNING
A new dawn breaks
red
lighting up the sky
colouring the clouds
cracking
grey
to pink.
But shepherds warn
still
of stormy times
even
as the paler tints move in
the dark stays
breaks
fragments the red.
As dawn
cracks
chaotic
it’s unclear
which forces
shall prevail
when dawn
becomes
day.
Lynn White
NOCTURNE
The fallow field was like a spangled cloak
Of twilight spread before us, sequined
With bioluminescent abdomens
Of earthbound angels wandering through the grass.
Sunset was disappearing, outshone by
The bright and evening star which swelled and pulsed
As though it were about to writhe in birth,
And so reveal new mysteries to the world.
We watched in silence as the stars above
Peeked timidly below as though the night
Was not sufficiently advanced for them
To rival the sublunary display—
And held each other’s hand, merged in the gloom,
Cool with intrinsic light, like fireflies.
Lee Evans /