DARK

By David Boyle

Rage, rage against the dying of the dark.
Resist the dawn. Cheer on the gathering gloom,
And deep inside that blanket, send me dreams –

Send me down where unmade poems live,
Like ancient river monsters, nibbling in the deep,
green with age and meaning; where the wild things are.

Send me to the cellar, to the woods at dusk,
The feel of frost on face, the chance of magic,
To sense the dark creative roots of life.

Not every day, perhaps. But let me keep
The weedy pathway to that secret garden
well-trodden; at least the possibility of night.

So when you watch the last blue streaks of day,
The clouds of dusk beyond like great black hills
over London – don’t mourn the loss of bright.

Don’t mourn the roar of 4-star, DJs, DVDs,
the glass-walled fluorescent cacophony of day,
Those walkmen, binaries that never sleep.

Turn off the lamp a moment, let the black
seep into the pores and know the fear,
the joy, the wealth of practising for death.

II

Sometimes the light becomes
too heavy. With its jingles
and its neon borings into minds
and I long for darkness,
long for black so deep and fathomful
That only stars can pierce inside.

So when the museum is closed,
the fridge door shut, thee caretaker having
locked his gate and pottered home to bed,

then give me the windswept dark –
The rabbit hole abandoned on the moors
before the Wars of the Roses.

Give me the silent dark,
Beyond Titanic on the ocean floor,
where eyeless fish just breathe and sleep.

Give me a place with the dark things, in
the deepest chapter of the night,
where the mould considers its position.

Where the magic sparks, with a flash
of deeper darkness. Healing happens.
Where we dream of long-forgotten things

in half-forgotten sunlight, of hopes
we never named. Where poems grow
In damp and dark and desolation.

Where I go, perhaps, to sleep and feel
a quietness in thee marrow of my life and
hear the merest rumoured glimpse of God.

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Dark can be found in 'Oh Shenandoah! Very selected poems' by David Boyle.