When God demanded light,
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he didn’t banish darkness.
Instead he invented
ebony and crows
– Linda Pastan
‘The divine darkness may be our greatest ally rather than a danger to be feared,’ writes Deborah Eden Tull, upholding the spiritual power of darkness and echoing Wendell Berry’s line: ‘The dark, too, blooms and sings.’ Linda Pastan’s Why Are Your Poems So Dark? – in which she answers a hypothetical or very real question at the heart of her work – is an ode to the power of the ubiquitous and necessary darkness, and sadness, in our lives.
Why Are Your Poems So Dark?
Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?
And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished
without the dark stain
of alphabets?
When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.
Instead he invented
ebony and crows
and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.
Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”
Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
Linda Pastan (1932-2023)
From: Almost an Elegy: New and Later Selected Poems