Preface
If you look at Nighthawks long enough, it begins to look back at you.
At first, it seems simple: a late-night diner, a few figures, a quiet pause in the city. But the longer you stay, the more unsettling it becomes. There is no door, no way in or out. The people sit together, but not connected. The light holds them, but it does not warm them.
This poem grew from that tension.
Painted in 1942, in the shadow of Pearl Harbor attack, the scene carries a quiet anxiety, a sense that the world has shifted. The figures do not speak, and yet their silence says everything.
Writing this poem, I imagined myself standing outside that glass, looking in - not only at them, but at us. Because that distance has not disappeared; it has changed form.
Today, our glass is everywhere...
in screens, in habits, in the space between us.
This poem is not just about a painting. It is about the shared loneliness of being close, yet unreachable, and the quiet question that remains:
What would it take to break the glass?
The Light in the Window
I saw it before I saw them,
that hard yellow light
poured out onto the pavement
like it had somewhere to be.
Too bright
for that hour.
It cut a clean shape
in the dark
and held it.
So I stopped.
Stood there
with the night sitting on my shoulders,
watching.
Inside -
four people
close enough to touch,
and not touching.
Coffee gone still.
A hand wrapped around a cup
that wasn’t being lifted.
Eyes drifting past one another
like missed turns.
And the glass,
that wide, unblinking pane,
kept everything in place.
No door you could reach.
No way to step inside it.
Just light
held in its frame
like a specimen under glass.
I’ve been in rooms like that.
Sat close.
Said nothing.
Felt the space between two people
stretch thin...
and knew better than to try and cross it.
Keeps it in its windows,
in late-night counters,
in the quiet between passing cars.
Back then
they carried it without a name.
Just sat with it.
Let it sit.
Now...
we carry our own small light.
It lives in our hands.
Screens lighting our faces from below.
Thumbs moving.
Eyes down.
A whole room lit up,
and nobody looking up.
I stood there a long while.
Watched them stay
exactly where they were.
Watched the light hold them.
Watched the night
wait just outside,
patient as ever,
for one of them
to stand,
open the door,
and step out into the dark.
GBS jr
1995
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