Night Voices
"Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night"
- Henry Vaughan
The day's dry business over,I listen
For spirit voices in the dark. It's then
I hear them if at all calling on currents
of air, barely audible, or bellowing
in gusting winds. They visit at night
because the containing dark is deep enough
While light is a shining face, a reflection
from surfaces they cannot enter (when the Sun
visits a forest its deeps are sealed as light leaves them).
Vaughan had Nicodemus speaking with the Sun
at midnight, a small conceit, but one
which screens divine light on a protecting veil
of shadow wherin he saw the dewy hair
of God shining and caught the still word
with stilled senses, not seeking to know
As we came, long ago to the court
of the Goddess in moonlight and knew
ourselves by a forgetting. So I keep
my senses open, but tuned to movements
of the air, for sighs in the dark
which always catch me unaware.
[This poem won a prize in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition 2001]