Photo by Egeni Tcherkasski
A single light can lead you home. One light
is all you need to break the back of night
when darkness seems to weigh more than it has
on all the nights before, and nothing’s as
it was. Bit by bit, the lighter shades
of night you used to trust have faded as
you stopped believing in relief. The dark
goes on forever, and begins right where you are.
But when your eyes can’t guide your steps, you learn
to trust your heart instead. You rise and turn
toward where you need to go, and in the dark
you think you see a glimmer like a star
that wasn’t there until you headed home
through darkness, trusting that a light would come.
From Dana Wildsmith’s poetry collection One Light (Texas Review Press, 2018)
Reprinted with permission.
