Mary Kay Rummel
Welcoming Night
I’m learning to let the dark
into my house, my body, my soul,
to let trees show me night is a scouring
strong enough to smooth rock.
I’m learning to let the night in,
the way it engulfs those cottonwoods
on the hill across the pond.
Sometimes darkness comes inside hungry,
pulling a leash that’s tied to an oak.
I try to welcome its growl and roar.
On midsummer evenings as dark crawls
up trunks to crowns,
there’s a letting go, a slow reversal.
Tops of old trees hold
the yellow moon while around me
roots quiver — silence, their talk.
Tonight I watch fireflies weave
across a black scrim of leaves —
the blink of my time in air.
Mary Kay Rummel’s ninth poetry book, Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone, is from Blue Light Press. This Body She’s Entered, won a Minnesota Voices Award from New Rivers Press. The Lifeline Trembles won the Blue Light Award and Love in the End was a winner from Bright Hill Press. She is poet emerita for Ventura County and a founding member of the Ventura County Poetry Project.