Drawing the Dark

Kobus Moolman

Day and night, night after night,

deep in his prayer, he deliberated

whether it was possible to draw the dark

without ever looking at it.

He had his head in his hands.

His hands covered his eyes.

His breath caught on words that tasted like ash.

Day and night, night after night,

he dragged his slow feet across

the frozen lake of memory.

It was dark always, there

beneath that bright layer of appearances;

a darkness he trusted,

the way a child trusts his mother

to recognise him in the rush after the bell.

And yet now, oh,

now, after so many mistakes, so many times around

the same stale track of reaction,

he had begun to wonder whether

it could ever be possible to look, only

look into the inside of the darkness

without being turned into it.

Featured at the Red Wheelbarrow on 15 February 2022