The Book Of Night One Poem by Daniel Brick

(I)

DARKNESS IS OLDER THAN LIGHT:
The first thing to shine, and announce
its presence was Darkness. It was
a marvel then, simple but striking:
Darkness was just one thing, but it was
mountainous and unmovable, it piled higher
and higher, it sank deeper and deeper,
and never for an instant did its shining
diminish or alter its intensity. It was
simply a time of single things, there was
no blending, no uniting and consequent
union, no rushing together of things, mightily
pulled toward each other. It was just a still,
silent, stolid sphere of dark shining...

And all lights were trapped within its vast extent.
Small rays and long photons, long rays and
small photons, single things composed of Light,
squeezed through dark corridors and condensed
into shining globes whose igniting created a new
realm - light interposed with darkness, a light-world
equal to its parent Darkness, engendering its own lives
across Time... across Space... We human beings
are composed of an inseparable bond of Darkness and Light.
At home in both realms, we belong to neither wholly:
we are creatures of a divided legacy....