Darkness Begetting Light
by Odin Roark

To know of light
before one’s darkness
is to know not of.

For beneath overcast
lies the wisdom of weeds
starved of good will,
where growth is random,
wild without direction,
purpose stifled
yet an anomaly rendering its lesson of growth.

How arresting,
this straight route
the hoe and plant,
the irrigation and harvest
taught as the obvious way.

But surrounding such reward
marches the oft times strangulation
of the unwanted,
the struggling wildness of nature’s orphans,
that beset with ancestral vagrancy,
nomads of leaf and stem,
flowering thorns of struggle,
surviving their plight with tenacity and…

Hope?

What celebration there must be
When rat and cockroach
exchange mutual reverence for survival
with the ubiquitous weeds.

Fantasy? Perhaps.

Then come humans.

Petty gender neutral contractors with life,
on up through the distinguished men and women of letters,
industrial giants, becoming deep-pocketed patrons
of the arts, numerous statesmen and rulers,
bestowing but weed-like room for leaders.

Such behavior leaves
darkness begging for light,
even as the ignorance of blackness
suffocates the reach,
sending what few rays of illumination
to the grounding of shelter,
where many of life’s roses
beneath the snows of compassion’s frigidity
await the spring of cycling,
where along with the insects and vermin of survival,
the scraggly remnants of vegetation’s battle lost,
will welcome together yet another summer of rebirth
along with man’s soul-bake,
where the heat of mother-sun will drive
still more of our sentient species into the silent funerals of loss,
that place where time presents no one’s funeral,
yet everyone’s anticipated wake.

Here, the subways of our travel
will pause, reveal through desperation smeared windows
the facades of beingness rolling away,
finding solace in the company of the wilds,
some trusting in hope,
while others merely awaiting their self-imposed
captivity into the past without historical meaning.

Such is the laughter of so many gardens of death,
having to wait yet another birth.