Size / / /

It's night of course;

it always is, isn't it? Universal,

and I speak literally. Dark

is the natural state of things—

dark matter, dark energy, making up

ninety-six percent of the universe

we think of as our own

& the light

we survive by and worship

nothing but a trivial aberration,

despite the dependency of such entities as us.

Yes, let there be Light! Ah, the Glory!

that brings forth life upon the sludgy stones

kludging lonely in the dark . . .

each luminous object expelling its substance

into the dark quantum by quantum—

light the visual manifestation of decay,

like corpse-light, a celebratory sort of sparkle

surrounding indomitable entropy.




David Lunde is a two-time Rhysling Award-winning poet and translator whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov's SF, Absolute Magnitude, Star*Line, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, New Worlds, Galaxy, Worlds of Fantasy, Whispers, Poetry, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. You can see more of David's work in his published collections Heart Transplants & Other Misappropriations, Blues for Port City, and Instead, in our archives or on his website. You can email David at davelunde@earthlink.net.
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