A FEW QUESTIONS FOR THE IMPARTIAL DARK

(inquiries inspired by Mary Oliver's "Night Flight")

All of Mary Oliver’s poetry is a treasure. But “Night Flight,” for me, is a revelation. My first exposure to this beautiful gut-punch of a poem prompted days of journal entries—about the nature of the human condition, our devotion to self delusion (“the fierce assumption of our lives”), and our determined avoidance of the Great Mystery that many of us call God, and some of us, like me, fall in love with, despite our complete lack of capacity to understand what it is we love. The brief poetic inquiry below rose out of those journal entries. My words pale next to anything Mary Oliver penned, but the questions—aren’t they the ones with which we all wrestle in some form, like Jacob with the angel by the river Jabbok? And by the injury of that wrestling do we not all walk with a limp all throughout our lives? Is this not the core Mystery and Pain that binds us all together?

A FEW QUESTIONS FOR THE IMPARTIAL DARK

by Michael D. Warden

What do you mean to do with me,
A dollop of cerulean blue on the tip of your brush
As your hand, itself a universe of mystery 
stretches out toward the infinite ceiling of the Perseus cluster?

What song of the universe do you mean to blend me inside
On your languid way past great Jupiter’s arc toward a distant crescendo
light years beyond the Milky Way, Triangulum, or fair Andromeda,
itself a light foreshadowing of a climax to an opus 
I can never comprehend nor ever even hear?

What am I, Great Silence? 
What are you?
What are we?
And why?