Oh, Darkness: A poem
On the longest night of the year and our relationship with darkness
Oh darkness You alchemy of God You pithy black nothingness I ought to punch you For the wreck of your associates Evil and filth and death If only I could find the neck of you You ungrippable absence Oh darkness You friend of the friendless Could I call you a comfort? When I wake in the night You bury me in the blanket of your folds A closeness parts of me crave A home for my shadow The me I wanted buried Until I could welcome him back. And before the sun chases you off Show me my heart The honest groan of my pain Oh Darkness You Gypsy trick A coin flipped from the hand of God You promised to rig this And spin night bright as day Wring light from dark Gold from hay Joy from sorrow Beauty from black soot
I have such a mixed relationship with darkness. I lament the darkening days of fall and winter, but also find that parts of me crave this chance to hibernate, be less seen, bury in the ground. Even in the summer, when most of me relishes the warm sunny days of Colorado (of which we have 300 a year) I find I actually crave cloudy days. They let something in me turn inward, burrow down, drop the smile.
Darkness gets a bad rap as a villainy character, in the lineup with sin and evil. Yet, the writer of Psalm 88 called darkness his friend. And though we might wonder if this were sarcasm or sure evidence he had depression, I find I relate.
For parts of me, darkness has been a friend, a place I hide myself until I can welcome more of me back. We drop the pretense in the dark. We get a little more honest with our grief or secret insecurities or longings or weariness or some other vulnerability. Those things just need to be hidden for awhile, kept veiled as it were, known only to God ourselves and the dark, to grow and become. And the shadow of a late night or early morning, the closed pages of a journal, or the hush of our own silent inner world can hold those places until we’re ready to know them in the light of relationship.
Darkness can’t be your only friend. But on this, the longest night of the year, I want to honor that we all have a relationship with darkness, with hiddenness, with veiling parts of us until they can see the light. Not everything we keep in the shadows of our being is bad or wrong or sinful. Far from it.
This may be an odd way to send you off into Christmas and the end of a year. But amidst the Merry, most of us battle the Gloomy too. May the God for whom “darkness is as light” (Psalm 139:12) find you in your secret griefs and scary risks and heavy hopes, the ones you usually hide behind a smile.
Thank you for being here, my reader friends. As always, if you enjoyed this, please share with someone who would appreciate it.
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I am plotting and planning and writing some really fun things for the New Year. I can’t wait to share them with you.
Did you write this poem? Well done.