Mountain Midnight

There is no such thing as silence

or total darkness

not here, snuggled into a bedroll

on Melissa Corey Peak.

I am the last awake

everyone else (over two hundred of us)

is worn from the day,

21st century children

walking into the past

shirts, skirts, shoes all  heavy with dust.

My eyes are fixed on the dome

above.

The sky is no flat thing

like back home,

a sheet tacked to the ceiling

grey with fog and light pollution,

no.

Here
it is darkness, lit up

blue-black silk reaching down

in all her speckled splendor,

past the horizon formed by hill and treeline,

below my body
so that I

so small and significant

am suspended
surrounded by the gleaming.

The wind, with the smell of cold

sings through our campsite,

sends the summer-dried sagebrush rattling,

and I shiver

shudder, but cannot bring myself

to shield my face

and stop looking at the stars.