Lifting of the darkness....

Winter-Worship

by Charles Wright

Mother of Darkness, Our Lady,
Suffer our supplications,
our hurts come unto you.
Hear us from absence your dwelling place,
Whose ear we plead for.
End us our outstay.

Where darkness is light, what can the dark be,
whose eye is single,
Whose body is filled with splendor
In winter,
inside the snowflake, inside the crystal of ice
Hung like Jerusalem from the tree.

January, rain-wind and sleet-wind,
Snow pimpled and pock-marked,
half slush-hearted, half brocade
Under your noon-dimmed day watch,
Whose alcove we harbor in,
whose waters are beaded and cold.

A journey's a fragment of Hell,
one inch or a thousand miles.
Darken our disbelief, dog our steps.
Inset our eyesight,
Radiance, loom and sting,
whose ashes rise from the flames.

"Winter-Worship" by Charles Wright, from Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems © Macmillan, 2001. Reprinted with permission
Yesterday, as I was driving in car on a midwinter sunday afternoon, i was struck by a feeling of cold darkness. I realized it had already been dark for almost three hours, that the moon had begun to appear in the sky around 3pm.to me, it felt like midnight, that the winter night had this luminous ,expansive, never endingdness.for some reason,not yet revealed to me the darkness of winter as it looms upon us earlier and earlier afore the approaching equinox is densely palpable to me this year ,more than any other that I remember. I searched for words to express something coherent of this troubling desolate sentiment and then this poem appeared this morning. sometimes a voice that gives words to our deepest thoughts ,a kindred spirit can begin to lift the darkness....