The town is suddenly blotted out.
As
my eyes adjust to soft blacks,
emergency
lights glimmer on in tower blocks
and
I imagine people on their hands and knees
scrabbling
for half-forgotten candles at the backs of drawers.
You
stand beside me, a smudgy shape
safe
as grey felt.
Cars
nudge forward on the narrow street
lighting
a huddle of revellers on pavements,
expressionist,
mugging for effect.
A
woman says that the blackout is island-wide
that
the power link has been lost with France
and
a passer-by jokes that it’s like the war, a curfew.
Someone
will want to tell ghost stories soon.
We
become spooky without familiar markers,
glow-worms
inching forward by the gleam of mobile phones
anchored
to voice and touch, heading towards the arts centre,
to
the Frankenstein film I’ve seen before -
1931
black-and-white, Boris Karloff,
his
made-up face a parchment of greys
caught
in cinema’s ghosting machinery.
It’s
lighter now outdoors than in
a
soft flush falling from the sky.
As
we wait outside the dark-struck cinema
a
study in blacks and half-blacks,
I
want to say something profound
about
the carbon in our bodies coming from stars,
but
I’m enjoying being blanked out, uncoloured.
I
could shelter in this shadowiness
unfixing,
becoming liminal,
floating
high above the monochrome island.
Your
voice, inside me, teasing and calm, brings me back.
Light
will scare away half creatures, unfixed ghosts.
Should
I grab you in the dark?
Could
we find a way here in the gloaming,
blending
atoms in these cinder blacks?
Have
we made our world too bright?
Lost
the instinct for half-light, half-anything?
As
soon as day creeps back,
as
the shadows of buildings become buildings again,
people
will rush to post photos of the darkscape online,
but
black is always there behind,
the
sudden going of light like a person leaving their body.
Jacqueline Mézec
This poem was a runner up in the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition 2014.
Jacqueline Mézec
This poem was a runner up in the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition 2014.
