Darkness

S. T. Brant

Darkness never dissipated, never was clothed
Over, resplendent- Let there be light, loving
Lie, a translation known by heart, aimed
At heart, mind, being, self.
A voice declared Let it Seem light!
            Why?
Could god not disintegrate the darkness?
Or is dark the requisite field that must lay
            upon the field before Life alights?
Was there no desire for things to last?
Some experiment or challenge?
A sleep we’ve wakened into, to go from sleep
To deeper sleep to one day return upward
Back to sleep; or achieve the worse nightmare:
Waking, advanced beyond our starting sleep,
To stare eye to eye with god
And determine for all Life
If the one that won the contest can bare the company.
Could any being fare so well in this reality
To look upon pure Caprice and our creative shadows
Undestroyed? No reality could ready one for such a test.
The light is a lie. Life is a darkening of Dark.
A dark that trespassed Dark and lapped Seeing,
Heavy is the darkness of our souls, the material of Dark.
We are dark inside, leaves of the dark tree of the abyss,
Under which Caprice sings and sits.
Live in such a way to die not withered, die a flower.
Bloom. Our deaths, bloom, bloom to Dark.
When home we can decide to knock upon the door
Or not, though the knocker will be issued.
We have no chance on scales of Presence.
Can there be Purpose, can someone win?
            No one can.
Purpose remains a possibility impossible to redeem:
The action voids the dream.
We wake to a worse sleep-
            True awareness in cruel abundance.
            Our lives oppose god in a staring contest.

The Science

The start of the universe, Life: the Big Bang. The poem takes the stance of the Big Bang, being a religious mythology that imagines entropy as a force, an androgynous Light and Darkness, contending in a battle of disorder versus order to see how Life will organise itself. Not being a scientist, sometimes my grasp of science can be strained, so to make sense of things, I have to fit science into theatre, into Homer, and impart impartial forces with vanities. So the question ‘Why Life and How?’ become a teleological battle, where the rapture that began things quickly cools on that passionate initiation and desires to contract, with the wrinkle that life grew out of that burst and also has its vanities and will do what it can to battle against the inevitability of the End.

The Poet

S. T. Brant is a teacher from Las Vegas. Pubs in/coming from EcoTheo, Timber, Door is a Jar, Santa Clara Review, Rain Taxi, New South, Green Mountains Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Ekstasis, 8 Poems, and a few others. You can find him on Twitter @terriblebinth or Instagram @shanelemagne.

Next poem: frozen clocks by James Curley