There was once within me an unconquerable umbra

It wouldn’t dare capitulate against my steadied will.

I would spin my wheels struggling against the shade

But that only made bloom the now-perpetual inner gloom



And soon there was a new overhead

With the Black Hole Sun that was prophesized from the garden

That promised an erasure of agony

And the eradication of charcoal rain.

But relief didn’t come for liberation galavanting on a white horse

Rather distress and despair crept over the horizon and devoured every ray

Once the veil of darkness eclipsed the God Helios

A smaller darkness crept in my pores and created within me a miniature abyss.

An unflinching persistence allowed me to walk the shadowed terrain

Where even the bright-eyed nocturnal hunter decided to remain hidden.

Behind a grey hill a light shone through pinpricks in the sky

The light was smaller than a strand of hair but brilliant all the same.

Gathering the elusive beams was the impossible task I dared daily

With time I discovered where it is easiest to find them

But it was always when it was most dark

There were times when I casted myself into oblivion and lost every strand I had.

Years would pass this way but the nocturnal poet became careful

Latching onto each luminous fiber and knotting them together.

In a process that dared to rival the slowness of evolution from single-cell to simian

I climbed the thread of precarious light to ascend above the valley of the shadow of death.

No heaven or other precious paradise awaited the prostrated poet

The spec of blue and green that whirled around Helios welcomed me back

And it told me “you know future misery and grief but there will be joy and bliss too”.

There’s more light here than I remember; a million-million minuscule radiations of happiness.