In Night, I Find I Am Foreign Poem by Rebekah Gamble

At dusk, I hate the locusts
that make the sound
like the darkness is laughing.
It is not good
for something with so many changing faces
that wraps up and around you,
swells up in you,
to begin to laugh and cackle-
the irony and sickness, the mockery,
has a good chance of eating you up.
In the deeper parts of this particular night,
I am entirely alone,
more alone than I have ever been-
without the things that give life the energy of life,
and without the hope of ever recovering such intangible things,
left alone with the void
of where these things were, where they belong.
Even the dead, who are always bothering me,
simply sit with straight backs and watch.
They sit with eyes
that are showing a theater of dark, endless depths,
and are taking in my performance
knowing that I am nothingness.
I am always more at home in the dark.
In the dark, echoes become deeper,
fuller, more meaningful,
they mature into speech, and sometimes calls.
Darkness has more intensity, more truth, more purity,
than day or light.
In night, the closest thing to true distress,
is when the parts of darkness
become judges rising up and around me,
asking me:
'Are you a stranger? '
And I must walk on in silence
because I do not know.