Retina Shadow

A commonplace minor moment in daily life brings back a life-changing experience:


Retina Shadow

The blinding resplendent brilliant blaze of sunfiring
In the translucent window
at the 'peak' of our old stairs,

Lighting to my eyes glaring defects
In the polished stairstep walls.

And afterward, for an hourglass,
That irised rectangle of remembered light
Luminous shining

Bright-blinds me to all lesser
Things than transcendent,

A euclidic image in front of my vision,
The 'optic mystic' nerve gleam
Of photo-receptors

Turned into lighted-ecstasy in my mind
As I trudge about the hectic scurry of my hour'd day,

That brilliance of aperture at the center
Blaze-blinding
Finite briefness

(Me, muddled primate
In this pit-caved depression
Of emptiness, and not.)

Yes,
The after shadowed light of Reality
Far brighter

Than temporary nature's harsh survivor'd death glare
Or the gray-dusted rituals of our
Decadent cultures of shame;

Look, not to this dark cavern,
But to the sun-resplendence,
Of eternal goodness, truth, and beauty.

Oh, the after-glowed
RADIANCE!



--Daniel Wilcox
First pub. in The Greensilk Journal
in different form

We can forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
-Plato


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox