Bereft of Light, One Stumbles in the Darkness

Music: Fugue in Eb Minor.
By Dimitri Shostakovich. Sequenced by J. Marques.

Alpha List

Hanukkah Poems

Jewish Poems

Bereft of light, one stumbles in the darkness,
Open to the fantasy of death.
None can grasp his being but by faith,
Nor can one see but by its candlelight.
In faith there is both fantasy and will.
Each must choose: to know or not to know.

More perhaps than not will choose to know
After gazing long into the darkness.
Reason cannot see what spirit will:
Kingdoms past the doorway we call death,
Undulating dreamscapes drenched in light,
So lovely none could render them but faith.

Light for eight days testified for faith,
Implicating love in all we know.
Love is a constituent of light,
Invading with the light our inner darkness.
To be in time is to be bound for death;
However, one may flourish where one will.

Gravity is greater than the will,
A fact that forms the boundary line of faith,
Breaking off where being ends in death,
Reason blind where one most wants to know.
In place of knowledge, all it sees is darkness,
Entering a doorway filled with light,
Lost just at the entranceway to light.

Eight days faith did not depend on will:
Light unfueled was proof against the darkness,
Letting sense sustain the words of faith,
Evidence unfeigned that all would know.
Nor could one then believe in utter death.

Sing, then, of faith, that helps one live with death,
Embracing death with love by candlelight.
To choose faith is to choose what one will know,
Having made one's truth an act of will,
Experiencing light in light of faith,
Looking for the light within the darkness.
In darkness is the womb from which the light
Zealous springs from death, the act that will
Awaken us to what no faith can know.