Universal Candle
Poem
I find it easier to write poems when the light doesn't find a way and it ends up in ditches dug holes places where it cannot dance Words flow and disentangle when reflections have no room to bounce you turn on the dark and give me a gag but the language is one for the universal candle Behind smoke guns and silk screens good mornings fade into nights where I write but no Marathonian woman or man will read the words as I intended them nor the words of John Abbot, a poet and priest Breathing is free while freedom isn’t. Entrapped we move without steps to the rhythm we imagine Because music and light had to be scrapped.
Wow! Such a striking poem, worth sitting with.
The whole piece is built on a paradox: darkness/suppression as the counterintuitive condition for honest speech. "Easier to write poems when the light doesn't find a way" - creativity forced underground, into "ditches, dug holes."
Stanza two turns that into something almost sacramental: the dark "gags" but the language still belongs to "the universal candle" - a shared, persistent flame of meaning that survives censorship even when no single reader gets to see it lit.
Stanza three is the darkest turn - "smoke guns and silk screens" reads like violence dressed in propaganda's polish. The "Marathonian woman or man" is a sharp allusion: the runner from Marathon who died delivering news of a hard-won freedom; here, no one like that will ever get the message as intended.
Then John Abbot, the actual English poet-priest, was imprisoned in the 1630s and spent the rest of his life in prison, condemned to death but never executed...his best-known work, Devout Rhapsodies, was written about the war between good and evil. That's not a random name-drop, it's a real historical figure who wrote sacred poetry from inside literal imprisonment, unread by the world he intended it for. It anchors the poem's abstraction in an actual life.
The last stanza names the core ache plainly: breathing is free, freedom isn't. Motion without steps, rhythm only imagined, because the actual instruments of freedom, "music and light," were confiscated.
This landed hard, especially the John Abbot reference. There's something haunting about tying your own "writing when the light doesn't find a way" to a poet who wrote from an actual cell, unread by design. "Breathing is free while freedom isn't" might be the most quietly devastating line I've read in a while.