Hózhó náhásdlíí

 A Christmas Eve poem for all who walk in darkness.

John Hwang : Skid Row

Beauty before you, in darkness;

In darkness, beauty behind you.

Beauty above you, in darkness;

In darkness, beauty around you.

In the back of your mind

you know it

and yet as you run against this dark current

you can’t even breathe.

In the back of your mind

there is a way that winds forward,

toward open road, still waters, nights of kind rest—

the kind others speak of as a common starling on a wire,

little knowing a rare bird has come to bless them again with presence.

You could go crazy

imagining the darkness embrace you 
with such love instead of betrayal, 
because now it slices you open,

stabs you again and again,

rejects you for the millionth time.

You could go crazy

remembering light, remembering a time

when light on the water touched you,

made you feel something;

when light in the valley

broke open your heart and nourished it.

Instead the cruel yoke 
bends you toward asphalt,

down to kiss the dirt and pay it homage.

Instead the iron rod

beats you into a cell half the size of your

burst hopes shriveled dreams

so that you long to evaporate.

Instead your shoulders

fold inward as you carry endless piles of coal

that fuel nothing that feeds you.

Instead your luminous face—

if only you still could see it—

is cloaked by an executioner

who kills without giving its name.

This is why I send the light toward you

to meet you in the valley at the center of the ocean floor.

It rushes like a fury of lava even now,

though you don’t see it,

though your senses are shrouded in exacting poison.

Fur-tongued, muscles seized, plugged, cloud-blinded—

even in paralysis you reach,

second by millimeter by aeon by mile.

This is why I send the light toward you

as you reach, whether you know it or not. 

It climbs the winter cliffs as the city sleeps in misery,

its gentle hands moving over each frozen cell

and calling them back to life.

It weaves this way around

every battered reed, every shivering seed

saying 
all is not lost;

everything is never lost;

anything that is lost can be made whole,

can be called into being out of what was not.

And so this is how I come for you.

This is how you walk in beauty.

In darkness beauty walks;

Beauty walks in darkness.

It has become beauty again.
It has become beauty again.