By Day Each Soul Must Walk Within Its Shadow

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

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Nicholas Gordon

By day each soul must walk within its shadow.
Only night can make us whole again.
Nor joy nor pain can race across the meadow
Night seeds with stars, so vast it were in vain.
In each new day hope rises with the light.
Evening comes: we hunger for the night.

More truth, and vaster, can be seen at night.
All time unveiled gathers in a meadow
Resplendent with the history of light.
Know that in the darkness, free of shadow,
Unto the primal moment, not in vain,
Shines all that ever was, alive again.

So do all vanished moments live again:
Events are past before we see their light.
The star that shines upon the darkened meadow
Has long since moved on to another night.

Give, then, all due attention to the shadow
As thoughts reflect off surfaces in vain.
Bright thoughts shall give us surfaces in vain,
Refracted through the mysteries of night.
In words we see ourselves set forth again,
Each incandescent in the wash of light
Lingering across the golden meadow.

Light creates a double world of shadow.
In every thought and word a silent shadow
Says its nothingness, until again
All faith and doubt are swallowed up in night.

Most lust for the intelligence of light.
In wisdom what one sees, one sees in vain.
Deep darkness is a blessing on the meadow.
In time one finds one's way across that meadow.

Eight days the god-sent fire cast its shadow
Long and dark across the door of night.
Let in the cold, the Being without light,
Else all love and laughter be in vain.
No faith but dies that we may live again.

Copyright by Nicholas Gordon. Free for personal or non-commercial use.

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