The quiet stillness hangs heavy in the Dark.
They call it Solitude, but this is a dressed-up word.
It is Loneliness, and the Night alone knows its silent savage effect.
One never feels so empty, so hollow, so hopeless and so truly
alone
As in that darkened stillness.
The days seem long when they are happening,
But at night they are just....
Gone, snatched away with barely a
Jumbled memory left to hold in their place.
How can this much of your life have been taken from you,
With so little of your Life's Work accomplished?
Where have the days gone?
How long has it been since you laid there
Thinking these very same thoughts, and
What have you done since the last time?
These are the things one thinks of,
Alone with the cruelty of unstoppable thought,
There in the dark, in the stillness.
The enormity of Life's flow lost cannot be understood by the young.
They are transcendent in their immortality, and
Elevate trifles to problems and problems to crises,
To be obsessed over and moved on from before the Moon turns,
Before the Dawn breaks Night's hold.
It is only after some of those days,
And weeks,
And months
And years
Pile up that their true worth becomes apparent, and
Even then there seems nothing ever to be done but
Bitter lamentation.
Moving forward,
Life plays out as the Tyranny of the Urgent,
One moment,
One thing after another that needs be done.
Only in the stillness, in the dark, do those
Moments which seemed so necessary
Fall flat when held up and examined,
When compared to ideas, goals and dreams.
The banality of daily life is almost too terrible to face, the
Shame of it might bring down Heaven's judgment at this
Very moment 'twere there any justice.
These are the things one thinks in the stillness, in the dark.
They say the death of a man is the destruction of a great library,
Full of works that can never be copied or retrieved.
Each day wasted is like a book thrown in the fire,
Given over to the hunger of implacable flame.
The binding cracked, the pages singed, now charred, now gone.
The fire eats the book without remorse - it will
Never ever be read by anyone.
These are the thoughts one has, alone in the stillness, in the dark.
[The poem was not completed, as one thing after another came up, and pretty soon it was morning, and there were things I had to do. I thought about leaving it and coming back to finish the work another time, but then I realized the metaphor was too perfect, and left it was it was. ]
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