After Twilight

2025 Solstice Poetry Award Winner

The night unravels, infinite and deep,

A hush of silence blanketing our sleep.

Stars whisper—distant, cold, and clear,

Each one a memory suspended in air.

Snow falls, almost without weight. 

Softening the earth it briefly claims.

The world grows still, as if to weigh

Its worth before the break of day.

Empty roads, quiet as regret,

Hold stories no one’s spoken yet.

Inside, a fire burns low and thin,

Its trembling light with all we didn’t say within.

Here, on the brink of time and place,

We feel the threads that bind our space.

A love too vast for words to hold,

A yearning bright against the cold.

Look close: the frost remembers more

Than what we swear is lost and gone.

Though snow will melt and stars will fade,

Something deeper stays.

Tomorrow brings its restless pace,

The bright, familiar world we face.

But this one night, so still, so brief,

Holds all of life between belief and grief.

By: Daniel Sullivan

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Daniel Sullivan is a poet and English teacher living in New York. He earned his English degree from Brown University and has been writing poetry and fiction for more than forty years. His work is shaped by a lifelong attention to language, patience, and the quiet force of what often goes unspoken. 

He writes in pursuit of honesty, silence, and lasting meaning.