! The Dark Night Of The Soul Poem by Michael Shepherd

Not death - no poem's yet been writ
on that - but that dark door and passage
where everything, all that one knows of life
must be surrendered, in the service
of a brighter light, a brighter life...

Only those who apprehend the soul
in all her glory, must submit
when time calls time, and there descends
that total darkness of the mind
which wipes out any thought of things
created; any sense of former life;
any creature that might say
I’ve done my best, so take me, God…
no, there’s nothing left, when hope
is as it never were; or ever named;
truth no longer means a thing beyond
this total darkness, which could not be more true;
eternity, pure timeless state of nothingness,
nightmare without movement, frozen heart..

how can those with nothing to hold on to,
no hands to hold, no reason to hold on…
what can they do, but curl up in a ball
like nature’s creatures faced with stranger, death,
that never spoke its name to them?

One thing only, mercy then will grant:
you will survive… pale, humbled, weak,
wondering what is left, to try to build
a pale approximation to a life
which now, you have no taste for…

and in the coming days, as if
you tasted water for the first time in your life..
you sense a strange new cleanliness..
there’s some new life awaiting, there,
wherever ‘there’ is.. to be lived…
perhaps a new created world
may come of soul’s dark void..

Who can understand, prepare themselves for,
this strangest blessing from the gods?
But that’s the package: unpreparedness is all..

Imagine, now you’re high and dry,
gasping above the sandy waterline, a shivering wretch –

imagine all the glories of a summer’s day;
all the stirring of the blood in Spring;
all the miracles that burst from earth…
an equal miracle, it must be,
the miracle of winter, stealing from us, leaf by leaf,
all we never owned…
this winter’s tale, the heart must kneel and praise;
as marvel; wonder; see as holiest whole -
this timeless, darkest, hopelost, night of soul.