Night Cycles: Poetry For A Dark Night Of The Soul. {book preview}
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“awaken. revel in the heat of your own flames. feel the drum beat throbbing in your gut, the searing nearness of the sacred fires, the slap of your bared soles against earth as you dance in the ash and embers of your own waking.
you were made for the light, for spirit and sinew, for the uncertain dark, for hands holding hands holding hands.
the song begins. you are not alone.” ~ Beth Morey, Night Cycles
Night Cycles is the story of spiritual loss and rebirth, drawn from author Beth Morey’s experience of that desert place Saint John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul.
Morey beckons us along as she descends into the deep yet vividly beautiful realms of mystery and unknowing, shedding layers and stale beliefs before returning to the light with vital new life and knowledge.
In the tradition of the mystic poets, including Mark Nepo, Mary Oliver, and Rainer Maria Rilke, these textured poems from a fresh voice nourish the seeker within us all.
*****
Excerpt from “Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul”
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DESCENT
wrestling rusted doubt
wrestling rusted doubt
knowing is my idol
speak, your servant aches to listen
reach down your holy calloused palm
knowing is my idol
keep this body red and breathing
reach down your holy calloused palm
can we weep together?
keep this body red and breathing
speak, your servant aches to listen
can we weep together?
wrestling rusted doubt
love limping home
(a found poem)
I have lived so long in this land,
a knife of glass upon the heart.
no fear. I had a dream of the great
Mother in the hidden valley,
never found.
many lives ago
the war priests guarded the secret.
one showed me a map. I’m
going there now, boots already
ancient with your dust.
(your mind only knew
part of the story.
my heart told the rest.)
night kissing
it looked like night kissing
at first, her lips pressing hot
against his on the snowy corner
outside the bowling alley
but a trawl of light shows
it’s really her head on his shoulder,
fingers pressing comfort
through downy winter coats
and I wonder what freezes
the flurry of hurt on her cold-
flushed cheeks, if his touch is
a salve or the shattering
you say
you say
we were never
meant for this vowed life,
golden bands of only us, and death
do us part. you
say love like it’s held in quotation marks,
that this union soured before
it started. no passion, no throbbing desire floods
your veins when you look
at me. all your slated glimpse can spy
is graying hairs and promises dulled
by your wavering. i can’t make you hard-
falling for me, for this pact
we sealed with the birth-blood
of our son. You say you’d be gone
if not for him, only two years of breath
and his heart is already scarred
by our tepid affections. you say
you’d like some adventure, and I suspect
“adventure” looks like a blonde in cut-offs,
tanned flesh a decade younger than the bed
we share in silence. you say you think
you will follow your heart after all, after
her, and I say:
what of when her humanity bleeds
too thick through her skin, when you wake
in the morning to a mortal wearing old
mascara and folds around her eyes?
when she asks you to hold her soiled
soul as softly as she’s held yours, or
to empty the overflowing trash (these are two
whispers of the same song), or to be here, be
here, be hers, like you said, you said,
you said you would. what of when she still
loves you after all the callous complaints
she’s choked on in the name of your catharsis?
what of when she cries as she watches
your flame flutter and die, when all she wants
is for your breath to waft her way once
more?
you say, that will never be, moving
toward the door. I say, it already
is.
in between
she slips along
the sidewalk with a belly full
of baby [again] and only poetry
books tucked up
in her arm’s crook and
she prays to feel as powerful
as she might if God sang silent
words into her ear and answered
all the rattling questions
now
rainbow
his ribs carve delicate
about his flickering heart and
rise, fall against
my own, deep and
profound as a whale’s dive,
regular as a clock. I won’t
mark time with these
breaths, the shivery
waiting for an end hammering
a(nother) chink where
the fear slips in. kissing
into his soft halo of golden strands,
smelling the sweet-sour human
smell, my soul slips
off its sandals at
all this holy.
it seems impossible
that we never
had this
with her.
old ways
(a found poem)
suppose the secret died
with the last guardian, the ancient
who stood at the gate in the valley
and saw the sacred
vein of gold.
God,
is there no faith left?
He has not told. I
would not know Him if I saw Him.
holy saints defend
the truth, trembling.
on the dying of David’s child
the old king clawed fetid, faithful heat
from his hollows and kissed the salt-
edge of his sword to skin and prayed
for rain in the desert of sickness and grief.
he gathered his graying tear-tangled beard
in weakening fists and wrenched the follicles
from their beds, a ravaged plot. he beat
his weathered form to the floor to buoy
his ragged prayers toward Holy.
he collected his queen and her women
in the bleeding chamber to wail with him
like wild cats of the anointed hill country
but the rattle shook silent in the child’s
throat and the supplications of the old
king shattered in the air, slashing
his soul to pieces in their falling.
disintegration
white daisies on the grave
it’s my fingers that drop
them there (did they?
i can’t recall)
i am a vapor of sorrow
petals — no, tears
that don’t exist
ease down cheeks
i used to have, falling
on earth’s dust, phantom
lungs throb with breath
i choke on the ash of sadness
i would keen if i could, if
i was anything
more than wilted legs and
these two hands
empty of daisies dolled
up in white death. i
think i died, too, the day
the sky hung like a portent,
mortar-heavy with meaning
iconography
the people gather and cling
to profane deity too smooth
and ceramic to root the heart
into, a shallow, fallow porcelain
ground. it is an anathema
of numbness, monotonous and safe
in its monotony.
the souls have never felt
such fetid and unaffected fervor.
Pathways to God
I thought it was supposed to be straight and narrow, this way. That’s what everyone said, after all.
He said it, too.
So I tried to live straight, tried to walk that narrow line. I clenched my jaw and my buttocks and
pushed away all questions and the not-knowing that threatened to cross my tightrope path.
They told me to walk this way, and keep walking. But when I looked down and saw that the way
that I had been following had cut off like the end of a movie reel, film flapping freely as it circles
and circles and circles, they didn’t have much to say.
Not much that was new, anyway.
What now, I pleaded. My narrow way has left off, and the world is howling wild around me.
Can’t you see my bleeding places?
No, they said. You are not bleeding at all. Keep walking, keep walking our way.
I tried. I tried. (I think. I hope.) I am tired. And the sure thing that everyone else seems to see is
nowhere to be found for me.
I am blind in the dark place.
What now? What now?
I close my eyes, because what does it matter when vision has failed me? I slide a foot forward
along the glassy ground that I’ve been treading, certain that I will feel all that is solid fall away
beneath my toes, that I will leave my breath behind as I plummet down and down and through
and into the vacuum of the lost.
I am at the gates of my own destruction.
(Or so I’m told.)
But instead of the cliff edge and the gaping, noiseless howl, my sole meets earth, rough and
gritty. One more trembling foot forward, and then another, and soon I learn to breathe again. Or
perhaps I take my first true breath, and anyway, it is not the poison I thought it would be.
I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I’m
standing in that I can’t deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see
now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first
time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing
toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It’s in my blood now, and I can’t deny it.
I can’t deny it.
I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is
light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision.
I can’t deny it.
***
Beth Morey writes, paints, and dreams in Montana. She is the author of Night Cycles and The Light Between Us and more, and is also the owner of Epiphany Art Studio. Her words and art have appeared in various publications, such as Somerset Studio, to linger on hot coals, Still Standing Magazine, Wild Goslings, and Disney’s Family Fun. In addition to her quirky little family and their three naughty dogs, Beth is in love with luscious color, moon-gazing, and dancing wild. For support in growing your soul through creativity, visit Beth at her website or follow her on Instagram.
***
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