Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

by Linda Pastan

Isn't the moon dark too,

most of the time?

And doesn't the white page

seem unfinished

without the dark stain

of alphabets?

When God demanded light,

he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented

ebony and crows

and that small mole

on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask

"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.

Ask what it has witnessed.

One time, in Portugal, a man who owned a food truck gave me a black marker and asked me to write something in my mother tongue on the wall behind his truck. I smiled, and hesitated for a while before writing. It was a beautiful day in April. There were no words needed to describe the beauty of the sea, the walk, the cold drinks; all I wanted was to stay in the moment, fully, without holding anything back. Later on, whenever something similar happened, I wrote the same thing over and over again. In my slim, cursive Korean, I wrote: 삶은 순간의 연속 . . . 전부 지나갑니다 . . . Because that was true. Life was mere a string of many different moments. And one day, even when I did not notice or want, it went away.

—thoughts after my camino, 260502