Make that case for darkness.
—Cameron Scott
All day the sun is lavish with its gold—
it touches every surface that it finds,
but there is nothing darkness will not hold.
In morning, all the garden flowers unfold
and midday light encourages the vines—
all day the sun is lavish with its gold.
The jeweled snake emerges from the cold,
receives the sun to warm its cambered spine,
but there is nothing darkness will not hold.
Like sun, it holds the blooms, the vines, the bold,
it also holds the undersides, the hinds.
All day the sun is lavish with its gold,
still there’s so much it cannot touch. Its whole
domain is only surface deep. Confined.
But there is nothing darkness cannot hold—
all forms, all feelings, shadows, spaces, souls.
Dark knows no differences, it draws no lines.
All day the sun is lavish with its gold,
but there is nothing darkness will not hold.
*A NOTE ON TODAY’S FORM … AS EXPLAINED BY POETS.ORG
The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.