“Where There Is Darkness, Light”*: How Poetry Happens

“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. . . . To begin you must be traced into the landscape, your people and your place found.”¹

Poet, to know your place, you must be still,
a quiet place you come to after years of running,
your people trying to keep pace, dropping behind,
waving goodbye, and you don’t stop, look back,
the night lightening toward day.

You record their names in your pocket notebook
so not to forget, inventing stories, meaning made up,
what they understand you have to do, not lying,
make believe, you, Poet, the protagonist of
one foot before the other, Time unsettling

in the dust of your wake. And now,
collapsed to your knees, who is left
to catch up, flip through the notebook,
fill in all you missed, knowing now
what they meant: I love you, I forgive you?

Pastor John has taken to calling me, “Poet.”
I look away. He is the poet, as are
the few others who read what I sometimes
write and follow the process to whatever
they can make of it. I’m grateful.

So, Poet, all your creative process begins,
returns, wakes in that child you become
each time you pencil the labyrinth through
each longest night of the year when,
a teenager, losing yourself in the dark

parting for the girl always next door,
not a cliché, but the unexpected savior
riding up on a shetland pony
(who could make this up!) to pull
you close and whisper, “It’s okay,

I will keep you,” that moment you knew
you were doomed a poet imagining
childhood sweethearts live happily
ever after, what everyone harboring
words understood and looked over

your shoulder, following with eyes of their heart,
a shared unburdening down the page to Now,
noonday, MWF, all the Little Ones gathering
from the streets, queueing up at the city of light–
City Light Community Ministries–

not a soup kitchen, a hot meal prepared for all
arriving from the byways–cell doors of self
thrown wide. The quick salvation of freight trains,
not today thanks, that close calling.
Soporific sidewalks. Hit and run and lie down

beneath E. R. fluorescents, ghost gurneys
helter skeltering. Clothing closets, second-hand
lives scrubbed, raised anew on wire hangers.
Poet, their touch can heal, each prodigal parable
yours, no metaphor too esoteric.

Couples holding each other up, the secret
of all poetry. How could you not know?
So, Poet, receive their offered chalice
in both hands lifted to your lips. Drink.
And there was light.