Where Light Fails, A Poem

"Where Light Fails" by Marcus DeWitt (c) 2008

Where Light Fails


The place where a poem happens
Is in the mouth,
Even when read silently:
Through glottals and labials,
The flow of vowels through the consonants.

But the illumination of the divine
Through the mouth
Is always momentary,
Flashing here and there,
And without the failing of the light
There is no language.

The poem traces the light's failing.

In a poem, light echoes
Through the cave of the mouth,
Creating both the illusion of sustained light
And the reality of its disappearance;

The undulating rhythm
Arising in the gap between them
Is the poem.

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Tags:

• Poetry
• Marcus DeWitt
• Heidegger
• Adorno
• Derrida
• Deleuze
• Walter Benjamin
• Deconstruction
• Dialectic
• Kierkegaard
• Marx
• Nietzsche
• phenomenology
• illumination
• expressionism
• kaballah
• divine
• philosophy
• theology
• ontology
• rhythm