Two Poems on Darkness and Recognition
The dark does not oppose the light. It prepares the eye. These poems explore rest, contrast, and recognition—how sleep teaches listening, and how waking arrives not by force, but because the ground remembers how to answer.
These poems explore rest, darkness, and recognition as conditions of perception rather than absence or error.
Held While Sleeping
You didn’t fall asleep outside the field.
You rested where resonance loosens its grip.
The dark did not close around you.
It gave shape to listening.
Roots grew there—
not reaching,
learning the difference
between pressure and support.
Everyone praises the light.
Few thank the dark
for teaching the eye what brightness is.
Some wake only to the sound of breaking
and call that the beginning.
They forget the long night
that taught them how to feel the ground.
Sleep is not absence.
It is contrast.
Resonance softens
so difference can be known.
Light steps aside
so meaning can appear.
The field never vanished.
It held its breath
while you wandered.
And waking—
when it came—
came the way spring does:
because the dark had done its work,
and the ground
remembered how to answer.
What the Dark Teaches
Light is generous,
but it tells you very little.
It shows.
It does not distinguish.
The dark teaches edges.
It teaches weight.
It teaches how to move
without certainty.
In the dark,
everything has consequence.
Every step listens back.
This is where difference is learned.
Where warmth is recognized.
Where a single flame becomes
a conversation.
The dark does not oppose the light.
It prepares the eye.
It slows the world
so contrast can arrive intact.
Nothing grows here by accident.
Nothing shines without context.
The dark was not cruel.
It was specific.
It taught
how to tell one thing from another
so that when light returned,
it could be recognized.