Longing Personified

Inevitability and the scent of sweet almonds linger The oil greasy on my fingertips Fate darkened sky A sense of urgency escapes the torment of youthful memory Hope campaigns for equal space I root for its victory

A spark of golden light Peeks tentative from its hiding place I coax it gently forward Afraid with too much insistence I will extinguish it’s potential Leaving myself open to shadowy wrath filled emptiness

The splendor of dawn Is still hours away But now Within the darkest part of night Star trails glisten over bristlecone pine Held safe in their path Like fairy lights to twinkle

A quorum of blackbirds sits silent in the treetops . . . Watching . . . . . . Waiting Obeying an obscure providence A Faithful expression of their character Understanding anticipates the need to soon blush the skyline And the damselfly sleeps late

I have been writing a great deal lately about what hope might look like when you are still afraid to hope but have a brief glimpse of what that would be like. In this case, I see it in my mind as what was once a bright glowing fiery excitement looking to the future, which has now slowly been covered over by soot or shadows until only an ember or spark remains.

Coupled with this image is another one relating to the hours before dawn. I often take the second image into the sunrise and the idea of stealing the sky from the darkness of the night. But in the case of this poem, the idea was more of what it feels like in the time before you actually see the sky beginning to lighten.

For me, this is a bigger expression of hope, because once the sky begins to lighten, you already know that the darkness will abate. But this poem speaks to the time preceding dawn, while it is still completely dark and you have experienced all the hours of darkness that came before it.

The summation of these hours of darkness can lead you into doubt that the night will ever abate. Being able to continue to perceive that spark within you, trying to fan it into so it overtakes the darkness and to then look outside yourself to see an even greater indication of hope — that of bright star trails in the dark night sky. Taken together, this represents the ability to fight both the darkness that is within you and that which surrounds you to focus instead on the light.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had her poetry featured in several anthologies including Untimely Frost. Her fiction has been published in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found here on Amazon KDP Select.

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You can also find links to all of the articles, stories, fiction and poetry I publish on Medium here. Thanks for reading!