(The darkest hour descends before the dawn)
By William Laferriere
Oh, the light within—
it flickers, does it not?
like a candle caught in hushed silence
or a frightened hare trapped in the cupped hands of night.
I feel it sometimes, pulsing,
a quiet hum within my soul,
a sunlit secret buried deep in the marrow of my being.
What is this light?
This glow, this ember—
is it memory?
The echo of a laugh?
the warmth of a hand held too closely and all too briefly?
or the shadow of a dream I can’t quite remember upon waking?
Is it something older,
something primal,
a spark left over from the birth of our cosmos,
stitched into the very fabric of our atoms?
It wanes of course.
There are days it feels like that dying rose,
sputtering in the cold, barren fog of winter,
a match struck in a storm,
its flame swallowed before it can bloom.
But even then, even in the dim,
it persists.
A faint glimmer,
a stubborn refusal to be extinguished.
And yes darkness lasts but a millisecond…
If you turn on the light…
And when it burns bright—
(Do let it burn bright—)
it’s a wildfire,
a supernova,
a lighthouse cutting through the thickest fog.
It spills out of each and every one of us,
golden and uncontainable,
painting the world unrecognizable.
Is this what it means to be alive?
To carry this light,
this fragile, ferocious & glorious light,
let it guide you,
even when the path is shrouded in the mist of doubt
Do share it,
And let it touch others,
And weave it into our collective existence
I’m not certain…
But I think, maybe,
this light within is not just mine.
Perhaps it’s ours.
A collective glow,
a shared radiance, a consciousness
each of us a fragment of something bigger, something infinite,
something eternal.
And so I tend it,
this light,
this gift,
this mystery.
I feed it with hope,
with love,
with the quiet courage of simply being.
And I trust,
even on the darkest nights,
that it will lead me onward.
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