Dans Le Noir? II

After I went to the Dans Le Noir? restaurant, I remembered the poem I had written about blackness which was printed in Poetry London a few years ago. I wrote it after thinking about the Dark Ages, and how not much is known about them, and how there is a lot of conjecture mixed in with history. So I imagined a time in the distant future where there is no light, and how their scholars will make up stuff about our time, which I called the Light Age.


An adumbration
of the Light Age

Scientists classify six creatures that lived in light:
Aardvark, elephant, carp, bee, bee-eater, and tern.
Their eyes were adapted to blinding conditions
Pupils clenched to pinpricks, eyeballs squeezed in sockets.

Life, scientists suggest, will persist in peculiar places
For this so-called Light Age stretched for millennia
Reigned over by a species of squinting hominid
Who flinched from blackness, and the comforts of night.

Their aggregations of rubble are irrefutable
But other signs of their passing are slight; token scraps
With unbreakable codes, unknowable categories
And glossaries of nonsense such as bright, colour and sun.

These perplex us with hints of a primitive ritual
That shunned shadow, and linked dark with death,
Bizarre beliefs which allowed no evolution, no self-expression,
No feeling for the two thousand and twelve textures of dark.

But surely they’d not recoil from the blaze of a sable fire?
Or hate the velvet days? And how in light did they stay sane?
Their light is gone, thank God; a static crackle that passed once,
At dark speed, into the vast pale voids between stars.