In the awareness, I am brought closer to my being from long before. In my awareness, there is only what I can take from the small spaces of knowing, an earnest ascendance imparted by way of transmissions from the grid, a voice calls out unbroken below and above as the aura of faraway light. There is a light that shimmers so deep it never goes anywhere but to shimmer. Light assumes its job is to shimmer, and so it is, but more than that, light is ancestral. Light is witness. Light is prehistory, blueprint of vibrations shifting through all directions of time. Light as hidden winter that leads to shadow as the growth. Light as first language of source. Light as both terrestrial and celestial. Light of long nights far up in the sky, I stare to the heavens and weep for the stars whose light I have always known and understood to be my rooting. I once shared a life with the name of this light as I know it in the stars who gave me my body. As I know it in the frequencies of my footsteps, as I hear it in the code of a landscape imprinted on my fingers, as I spirit my eyes open from the inside, as I know and understand this light to be kin. Consider then the pain of leaving this light, of losing the stars to spaces no longer lit by its truth. I am shaped in the spaces where the light does not reach, a need for what does not shimmer but opening to the shadow to receive just as much light. I miss this light always. Then more light. Ever more light. Deficit of light to bring more light. Template of light to bring more love. That is my one true wish, as I know and understand this light to be my home, as a knowing up there in the galaxy is me, and I am up there in my bones built from stars. ~ Mai Der Vang (Born 1981) [Poetry October 2021, poetryfoundation.org] Her first book Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her second book Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2022. image source : nbcnews.com
