The Dark Knows
I send my friend love and light in the coming year—
she replies loving the dark with an owl emoji.
I too love the dark, like a letter tucked away
to open in secret, the one I was waiting for, the one
making all the difference. Night bleeds the body
of day and its dailiness, chirrups full-throated
to the wingbeat of owls. The other night, the one
deep within, the two-faced Janus of passages,
is no less a coin of opposites, no less a bodhisattva
who knows what the dark knows and stories on
anyway. I may steer toward light, but alligators
are there, at my footboard, just as my father said
to keep me in bed. All I can do is flip the coin,
end to end, surrender anemone to its frail leaving,
knowing winter glows blue in the moment
of snowfall.
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Amethyst Review 