Paper Poetry’s March 2024 month-long prompt

Reveal the Light

All the light you cannot see

Photo by author — taken with an iPhone, unedited and off-centre!

All the light we cannot see
we are its power, its energy
absorbed within; part of you and me
transformed by our spirituality

Greetings to our Paper Poetry friends,

I don’t know about you, but for me inspiration to create poetry comes from the most unexpected places and at the oddest times. I was inspired to write the opening twittle while watching the Netflix series, All The Light We Cannot See, an intriguing drama set in WWII Europe and based on Anthony Doerr’s novel of the same title.

The story had me pondering our perception of light, and how the spectrum of light is so much broader than the bandwidth humans are capable of perceiving — the seen vs the unseen.

I thought about the symbolism of light and how we contrast the goodness of light with the evil of darkness. Light is the absence of darkness, just as goodness is the absence of evil.

And then I thought about blind people who somehow simulate an internal light in the perpetual blankness of nothing — light as a human construct that draws upon our senses and sensibilities so we ‘see’ with our ears, hands…