Accustomed to the Dark

Accustomed to the Darkness (A Cento)

The Nazi within me thinks it’s time to take charge,
And to forget Remembrance of Things Past .
Keeping it simple; being in love with light.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow.
We grow accustomed to the dark.
Though the moon still hangs pale over the water,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
You glimpse the life between the streambed and the ripples,
That world beyond us which so often disappoints.
The sad of honest pain, the chill.
A tune with no more substance than air.
There is the persistence of song.
There’s so little sweetness in the music I hear now.
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.


Stephens Dobbins-“Confession”; Tom Disch-“A Bookmark; Howard Nemerov-“Vermeer”; Sheenagh Pugh-“Sometimes”; Emily Dickinson; Raymond Carver- “Happiness”; Y.B. Yeats-“He Wishes For Cloths of Heaven”; Henry Taylor-“After a Movie”; C.K. Williams-“The Dance”; Robert Morgan-“Grain of Sound”; Henry Taylor-“Elevator Music”; Howard Moss-“The Persistence of Song”; Joseph Stroud-“Homage: Doo-Wop; Walt Whitman-“Song of Myself”.