When A Dark Night of the Soul Befalls Us
By Don Iannone

Some nights,
the forgotten cemeteries we live near
come back to life,
filling us with ghostly tombstones
floating on thick dark clouds.
Not every night they come,
but certainly on long dark nights, following days
when the world seems more dead than alive.
Morning can't come quickly enough on those nights
when the cries of those in-between
haunt the bottomless valleys we live in.
And when the cries subside,
the stone silence echoes deep
inside the empty cavern filling us.
Until it's finally over,
there is no hope that it will ever end.
And once it has ended,
we can only wait again
for the grass to turn black with night,
and for the air to chill suddenly cold as ice.
It is only then we come to know
the true meaning of light.