Nightward Poem by Daniel Brick

from "When Night Nears"by Tom Hennen

Light leaves the earth a piece at a time...
It falls into darkness... What is left is the dark
that feels like a body when you reach out....

The Night spreads itself
over our sleeping selves. We fall
into a dream, and wrap ourselves
in its warm contours. The dream-story,
already on-going for centuries of sleepers,
sheds plot-details the way a tree in autumn
lets go of leaves ready to be on their own.
It's a jumble of images, fragments of a story
that began nowhere and now circles everywhere
sleep, dreams and unreality coalesce.

In daylight, my mind reins in its own racing thoughts -
broken pieces that do not recognize each other,
do not know how to reassemble themselves
into a whole cloth...

Even as I sleep, my Night-Mind detaches itself
from its daylight component, and simply soars
in blind flight over and around the expanse
of darkness. This is the other view of Night,
which is etched in my deepest self. No fear of
nocturnal monsters, no night-terrors, no collapse
of composure. There is something I cannot see, but
I know the Unknown looms ahead of awakening. Mental things
bunch together, thinking is paralyzed. The Night-Mind
soars again, free, untrammeled, seeing nothing,
moving by intuitions that have existed for ages
upon ages...

Let the parade of night-things proceed
to the limit of their unreality, let them dissolve
into the morning light. This is still the province
of Night, this is the impetus of darkness.
Reach out and touch the darkness. Something
common and familiar will reach through the blindness,
and grasp your hand in the softest, firmest handshake.