Sabbath
On the holiness of desire...
Dear Reader,
Sometimes a poem arrives not as an argument or a confession, but as a moment of stillness: something small, luminous, almost embarrassingly simple. Sabbath came from one of those moments. A room. Midday sun. A body at rest. Nothing dramatic, nothing cinematic. Just light, skin, breath.
The longer I sat with this image, the more I realized the poem was circling something larger: how intimacy can feel sacred without being solemn, how desire can be quiet without losing its charge, and how the body of someone you love becomes a sanctuary unto itself—a respite from the demands of the world and all its exhaustive clamor.
I chose the title Sabbath because sabbath names a particular kind of rest. Sabbath is not mere idleness, or withdrawal; it is an orientation, a way of being in the world. Sabbath is the willingness to look carefully. To receive life as a gift, instead of grasping at straws. Sabbath is the invitation to honor the moment rather than rush past it. That moment is the space where the erotic and the sacred touch. Where tenderness itself can become a kind of devotion.
This isn’t a poem about sex in the explicit sense. It’s a poem about what happens just before or after—or perhaps entirely outside—the usual drama of desire. It’s about the ethics of looking, the holiness of presence, the small domestic rituals that hold a relationship together. It’s about the way sunlight can bless a body without any need for spectacle.
If the poem feels quiet, that’s intentional. There is a countercultural courage in quietness now. In a world that constantly demands performance, amplification, and exposure, this poem tries to make a case for attention as an end in and ot itself, its own form of intimacy.
So as you read Sabbath, I invite you to slow your breath a little. Let the stillness do its work. Let the light spill the way it does in the poem—gently, without urgency, without demand.
Enjoy!
-RD
SABBATH
Friday. Noon. Golden rays
of midday sun
landing on the small of your back,
the dip beneath your spine
like a bowl of amber
just waiting to spill,
the gentle rise of your torso
like the ebb and flow of moonlit tide.
I stretch and take it all in.
You roll to your side—rivers
of sunlight
spilling on your sheets.