Bright Wings 2024 Audience Choice Award Winner

An Ode to Hard, Dark Nights

Kimberly Phinney

This is a song in praise
of hard, dark nights:
no firelight,
no afterglow,
but the sliver of a crescent moon
and a few stray stars
flung out
into the wilderness,
calling you into the great Alone
with your animal self,
falling down
on tired knees
broken against the ground.
Then prostrate—
cross-like—
face down
and stretched
to the end of yourself
by how wrong you’ve been—
because, of course,
this is the end.

But there is still some warmth
coming up from the Earth,
and a humming
in the sweet black air—
some great vibration of life
that goes out before you.
And though you can’t see them,
the birchwood and pines
rustle inside the wind’s
divine pull—
in a dance of wills—
and somewhere,
a great horned owl bellows
his clear, determined hoot
like a psalm across the land.

So, you learn
to breathe,
again,
with his heralding—
a rhythm that beats
electric blue like a pulse:
“It’s not the end—
it’s not the end—”

No, this is not the end—
hardly an end,
but a hard beginning.
There will always be
a morning—
a rebirth.

So, here in the dark—
in a night bleaker than bleak—
in a time outside of time—
there is a mark
on the Holy map
of your soul
where you found
your Maker
in the hard, dark night—
and then lived to see
the light of dawn.