Poetry Thursday - Goulash by Myra Schneider

…While you’re stirring the stew

it dawns on you how much you need darkness.

It lives in the underskirts of thickets where sealed buds

coddle green, where butterflies folded in hibernation,

could be crumpled leaves. It lives in the sky that carries

a deep sense of blue and a thin boat of moon angled

as if it’s rocking. It lives in the silent larder and upstairs

in the airing cupboard where a padded heart pumps

heat, in the well of bed where humans lace together.

Time to savour all this as the simmering continues…

from Goulash by Myra Schneider, found in Poems of the Decade (hear the author read the whole poem here; it's also in her book Circling the Core)

I came across the poem, with its "darkness" passage, immediately after reading "Darkness and Light" by Kathleen Jamie in Findings -

and a week later, learned that some languages have words for only two colours, "light" and "dark". Meanwhile, and perhaps forever from now on, quotes about darkness (and sometimes, lightness) have been jumping out of the metaphorical bushes.