Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Ada Limon, In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
We’ve entered the dark. This week, we have “fallen back” to standard time. Turning the clock back seems like a useless shell game resulting in a week of being out of sorts as we adjust to the one-hour time lag. It’s clear by 4:30 the effort to eke more daylight out of the sun is futile. I’m watching layer upon layer of stormy clouds roll west overhead, knowing that they creep into the night, obscuring the moon and streetlights. The November dark clings to us, thick and heavy with the wet air. How do I embrace the looming, darkened day? How long will it take for my eyes to adjust to the dark?
The old stories begin in darkness. The gift of light. The wondrous technology of heat and energy was stolen from Olympus and gifted to humanity by the Titan Prometheus. Zeus was so enraged at this powerful transgression that he sentenced Prometheus to eternal punishment — his liver pecked away each day by an eagle, only to regrow at night — a 24-hour cycle of death and resurrection. Imagine his torment in the blazing sun and then the cool relief of sunset as his body begins to mend. Sunrise. Sunset. The darkness becomes a welcome relief.
Matthew Avina-Norris, The Sound of Light
The sound of light
A reverent touch
Softer-heard, is-felt
A quavering breath
Jai, If Tomorrow Lasted Forever
Would you feel alive —
are you in the place that you prefer to be —
in heart, in mind —
the body and the spirit —
when the day comes —
the one that does not stop —
Jazzy Jeff, Inevitable Loss of Time
I lost the time
How it went by so fast
How memories of special events,
Now a twinkling in my past.
Steven Leech, Death of a Dream
The streetlights are winking out
And in the shadows there are creatures scurrying about
Soon all there will be is the dark, cold, lonely night
In the face of that, does it really matter, wrong or right?
Yeyin Chin, Love in the Dark
I had to try to understand
that there was no longer a sun in my sky.
I’ve lived in darkness ever since.
Richard D. Owens, Undying Stream
Pain;
your sharp answer
drawing us nearer
to scream or whimper
on deflated bosom
DBDM, Hard Pain
Love for you is forever as my heart beats in my chest.
My thoughts and love for you will forever be true even at my death.
R. Miranda, Darkness’s Gift
As I approach this unknown thing,
the darkness begs for wont of light …
casting shadows upon monotonic gray matter
Le’Var Howard,The Gift of Darkness
In the darkness, I met myself and confronted my devil, my demons, and regained my will to live, to let go, to create light.
In Praise of Mystery was commissioned as part of Ada Limon’s US laureateship and engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper. While the poem celebrates the very questions we ask the stars, the mysteries of the dark we so badly want answered; we are firmly directed from “the cold distance of space” to our humble, earth-bound composition as beings composed of water:
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
The poem, this offering to the heavens, acknowledges our hubris — the kind that defies gravity, turns back time, the kind that is travelling the 1.8 billion miles to the Jupiter system like a flaming arrow returning to the beginning of the story. | TDS