new year's morning, under starlight

The night was heady and frosty. There was no wind and the air was cold and still. The stars were brilliant and hung low in the sky. There were so many stars that their light made the sky a deep cobalt blue. There wasn't a moon but the starlight served better than moonlight.


Francie stood on tiptoe and stretched her arms wide. "Oh, I want to hold it all!" she cried. "I want to hold the way the night is -- cold without wind. And the way the stars are so near and shiny. I want to hold all of it tight until it hollers out, 'Let me go! Let me go!'" 


She looked out over Brooklyn. The starlight half revealed, half concealed. She looked out over the flat roofs, uneven in height, broken once in a while by a slanting roof from a house left over from older times. The chimney pots on the roofs . . . and on some, the shadowing looming of pigeon cotes . . . sometimes, faintly heard, the sleepy cooing of pigeons . . . the twin spires of the Church, remotely brooding over the dark tenements. . . . And at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River and was lost . . . lost . . . on the other shore. The dark East River beneath the Bridge, and far away, the misty-gray skyline of New York, looking like a city cut from cardboard.


~ from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. 1943.  Chapter 46, pp. 403-404, 406. 


Someday I will write like this. I want to write with the same passion. With the same truth.