Less light was what they wanted.
Less light and a chance to look up
to see tonight’s old stars shining
and dying. Dark skies and fewer
street lamps leaking Lucozade
into a space once reserved
for heaven, where they might glimpse
Venus opening her door a crack,
or, leaning out of an upstairs window,
overhear God making plans in verse,
honing the moon into half-rhyme.
They believed – and said they had proved it –
that light pollution could cause cancer,
near-sightedness, insomnia and for some
drug addiction. They understood the heart
needs a dark place to thump undetected,
to go underground like a badger, burrowing
its own blind streets, to back out unseen
into fields where the beet sweetens.