Poetry |Return to Poetry Table of Contents

Ann Clark-Moore

The Dark Times

The horses whiffle and nicker
as I hunt by feel
for the light switches in the barn.
They expect

Who knows what horses expect?
Their routine includes being turned out now
with flakes of hay scattered
across the home pasture

if they’re too close together
the horses will fight,
particularly the alpha mare,
Lady,
the bitch of the barn,

So,
they expect to be turned out into the fresh air perhaps,
or they expect food,
or maybe they merely expect the flood of bright light
that accompanies our arrival in the winter mornings
when we seem to take the place of the sun

or anticipate it at least.

I will not turn the horses out today, however.
The sky still imitates night,
and a needling rain
just a degree or two above freezing
is driven by wind from the north.
I wouldn’t turn anything or anyone out of doors today,
not a wolf, a mad dog, my worst enemy.

These are the dark days,
when sleep, food, and warmth
are finally not enough.

In college,
I learned that my race used to have a festival
during the dark days.
They would invite all the neighbors
and drink and feast, sing,
commit all sorts of sins
(all the really good fleshy ones),
build the fires high
to fill the rooms with light enough and warmth enough
to convince them that it wasn’t cold and dark outside
and eat as if they weren’t worried that their hoarded store
might not last,
that spring might never come,
that under the frozen whiteness,
the dead earth might never put up green,
        growing things again
and the sun might never thaw out the
        marrow of the dead trees
and there would be no children
and everyone and everything would die
leaving the whisper of snow on cold stone.

So they would drink, and eat, and sing
for twelve days and nights,
and the twelfth morning
they’d chase one of the neighbor men over the white snow
and kill him stone dead
with a knife usually used for cutting mistletoe or holly.
The blood was to warm the earth, I learned in college,
and fertilize next year’s crop (of food and children),
and the cold, white winter sun should look down
        from a chilly sky
and see what it thought was its reflection in the blood
        on a snowy field
and think
“I can do better than that”
and grow brighter, redder, and warmer
and spring would come
and the dark days would be defeated once again
for another year
for the cost of just one neighbor

what a deal.