“If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant!”
—Jane Kenyon
Let it be the deep feathery darkness of a power outage, the houses turned in on themselves, hoarding their heat;
the spangled dark of a river flowing beneath trees, far from lighted streets;
the shadows inside a trunk no one has opened in decades, letters folded into their envelopes and forgotten;
the dark sounds inside certain words, like pulchritude or euphony, their meanings forgotten or never learned;
the consonance of jackdaws, black wings and voices rising together from the plane trees;
the moment when the house lights go dark and you sit among others, breathing together, not knowing what waits behind the curtain;
the mystery on the other side of sleep, where someone—you?—walks surefooted over the night’s paths.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 6.
Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 by Terrapin Books. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, and she is now working with Souad Labbize and Hélène Dorion on new translations.
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