In the last couple months of 2024 I had the opportunity to write some poetry centered on the season of Advent, a part of the Christian calendar leading up to Christmas during which Christians focus on reflection, on recognizing the darkness of the night but preparing for the coming dawn. These themes resonated deeply in me – images of darkness and light, of past and future – and one poem quickly turned into a sequence of three that connect and build upon one another. I'm calling these poems collectively Come the Dawn.

Over the next few weeks I'll be publishing each of these poems, along with a short reflection on what they mean to me. The poem here, "A Shift, A Turn," is the first of the collection.

A Shift, A Turn

Poem 1 // Come the Dawn (Advent 2024)

Yesterday, the before was dark and the next was light.
Today it shifted, the before to light and the next to dark.
Somewhere in the midnight, dread turned from retrospect to prospect
Like the circle of an albatross around my head.
Disoriented, unrooted, tossed amid the waters,
I cry for yesterday’s calm to anchor me in the night.

I believe, I hope, it will shine again some time,
Even here, even now, in the shadows,
Because I know the dawn after dark always comes.
Though I cannot see, I believe in the sun
And I pray it rises tomorrow,
Another shift, another turn, another glimpse ahead of light. 

About this Poem

I wrote this poem on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, as I grappled with the conclusion of the U.S. election and the reality that Donald Trump was going to be our next President (again). In a few short hours, my view of the future shifted from hopeful optimism that we would have our first woman President – our first Black woman President – to grim despair of having to endure four more years of Trump. To make it worse, I had to wrestle with the truth that we, as a nation, had chosen this. We couldn’t claim ignorance, or deception, or cheating. Our nation would get what we deserved.

Many of you reading this probably felt very different on that day, but I suspect you have felt that same sense of despair, that sudden shift from optimism to despair. In fact, I myself felt that turn again a few weeks later.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I received word that my grandmother had been admitted to the hospital because she hadn’t been feeling well and had fallen in her bathroom. While she was there they found she had stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which was likely to be terminal for her. That same day, my wife and I learned that Oscar, our angel dog we’d adopted over ten years ago, had aggressive prostate cancer that meant he had a limited time left with us. In a span of about twenty-four hours, we pivoted from wrapping Christmas presents for our families to visiting hospitals and thinking about end-of-life plans for deeply loved family members.

In this poem, I try to capture the disorientation and loss that comes with those unexpected shifts. It looks back and forward interchangeably, confusing the lines between past and future.

The first stanza focuses on the initial feeling of lostness, when you aren’t sure where you stand and, even though you don’t truly understand what just happened, you feel the weight of it pulling you into darkness, into despair. The second stanza tries to remember the light of hope, the promise of something better on the horizon, even though that light is a memory rather than a vision. At the end of the poem the Speaker remains in darkness. The final word is given to “light,” but that light is wistful, not realized.