Darkness: A History
Ariana Yeatts-Lonske
Eclipse meant the end of the world
when anything was the end:
drought, flood, bad harvest.
How they startled at the sky
before leading their best calf
to early slaughter,
before coupling in the fields, singing
desperate ancestral songs,
shooting flamed arrows at the sun.
A celestial monster captured the stars!
The sun and the moon made love
and hid their shy faces!
It is too easy
to look down at history
rather than across.
One day the dark swallows the sun
and we see its hunger has no end.
One day the century turns,
and each lit screen threatens: blackout,
empty vaults, planes plunging
from the sky.
One day a man breaks
the speed of light—
he travels that far away from me.
The secrets loose!
The sky heartless! All my planets spinning
off their axes!
But who can blame him? We’re all scared.
If I had a calf, I would have slaughtered it
already.
Ariana Yeatts-Lonske is a disabled poet, meditator, and educator. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from Vanderbilt University, and her writing has won an Academy of American Poets prize and a fellowship to the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. She was recently a finalist for the 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize in december magazine. Ariana moderates a support group for mast cell disease patients and lives in St. Louis with her partner.