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Poster poems: darkness

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For some poets it has meant solace, for others it is something fearful, or a kind of memento mori – but now it’s your turn to leap into the shadows. Post your poems about the dark

Even now, with the days growing slowly longer, darkness dominates these winter months, especially for those of us who live in relatively rural areas. But for many urban dwellers, true darkness is an almost forgotten condition, usually only experienced as a consequence of war, power failures or the deliberate seeking out of lightless indoor spaces. Our fear of the dark has led us to try and banish it, with the consequence that we have also managed to drive out the beauty of a starlit night from many people’s experience.

It is easy to forget how recent a phenomenon this technological elimination of the dark is. In Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, when the weary ploughman left the world to darkness and to the poet, it was a darkness the depth and quality of which most of us now can barely imagine. And in the dark, the poet’s mind was free to meditate on fame and mortality undistracted, and enter into a sympathetic understanding of the perpetual darkness that was the lot of his fellow denizens of the graveyard.

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