A light in the darkness is as strong a signal — and symbol — of humanity as you can find.
Things were dark at about this time last year. Just before Christmas, we invited local poets to shine their light on a troubled time. They responded with a generous bouquet of luminous, heartfelt poems.
Little did we know that we’d all be in pretty much the same situation at the close of 2021.
So now it’s officially a tradition.
I hope these poems, juxtaposed with photographs of holiday lights around Lansing, offer you a respite, a pause, a measure of comfort and, best of all, the gift of intimate communion with some of the more thoughtful souls in our midst.
It’s not all comfort and joy. While poet Ruelaine Stokes decorates her tree, she thinks of the horrific stories her friend, a nurse, is telling her about dying COVID patients, and hopes that our holiday rituals “lighten the weight of a dark season.”
“We too can shine,” she concludes.
Mary Fox also writes about the lights that “spark to strike against the darkness rising,” from Christmas trees and menorahs to the neon lights of a mission, the fluorescent lights of a classroom and the sudden blaze of a shooting star.
I came away from this year’s poetry amazed, and a little scared, of poets and their skills. There’s something uncanny about the way they combine raw intimacy with a mysterious, priestly distance.
In the poet’s private jewel box, pearls grow from granular, keenly observed, life-defining details.
Laura Apol, the Lansing area’s poet laureate from 2019 to 2021, watches a doe cross a river in the winter dusk, quietly and fatefully. She longs to greet the doe at the far side, “warm-nuzzle her forehead” and, most of all, to “know what she knows” about crossing a river — “what to take and what to leave behind.”
Cruz Villarreal basks in a memory of his loving mother rolling out a soft, pliable, warm tortilla.
Cheryl Caesar helps us find a “a transcendent signpost on our lives’ journey” — a sacrament — in the commonplace miracle of oxygen. (The phrase “mitochondrial hymn of praise” took my breath away.)
In a scenario suited to pandemic times, Jay Artemis Hull sketches a vignette of board games, cigarette smoke and kisses — “isolation gone to fruit” — in a moonlit lighthouse. Anita Skeen plumbs the twisted time tunnel of the COVID months, when “clocks and calendars were meaningless.” Her poem even starts with a lower case “c,” as if it had no beginning.
Zoë Johnson dreams of growing roots out of their fingertips and reaching down into the earth, where the stones share stories beyond words.
Rosalie Petrouske drifts through a memory of a Christmas Eve when she was 4. Santa Claus, smelling of wood smoke and her father’s cologne, gives her a candy cane. Later that night, she spots him again, lugging buckets of water, thawing and priming the water pump outside, “so it wouldn’t freeze in the night.”
As for Dennis Hinrichsen, Lansing’s poet laureate from 2017 to 2019 — I’m in over my head when I read his contribution, but I have a feeling the phrase “the poem is simply lure” might provide a key. Read it and see what you come up with.
“It’s a poem about gifting someone in need, and ends on a positive communal note that is celebratory,” Hinrichsen helpfully wrote in an email.
My subconscious is surely working on it. That’s part of the fun.
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