A meditative run through the Kettle Moraine
by Charles M. Sumid
Copyright 2025

In the moment between
switching off the lamp
and sleep arriving,
the room reshapes itself—
walls dissolve, corners deepen,
your own hand loosens
at its edges. Here presses close
the ancient deep, heavy as air
before thunder, as it was
before the first star thought to burn.

Within this void, a truth unfolds—
here is the profound quiet,
the vast canvas,
where light will soon begin to speak.

Wait.

Behind closed eyelids,
the deep darkness reveals
its geometry: how a sphere
has no beginning, how space
between atoms holds conversations
we’re too loud to hear,
how infinity needs no
brightness to be endless.

Your ancestors knew this,
read it in the gathering sky—
the place where everything
is still possible.
Before light carved the world
into this and that,
there was only the primal stillness.

In the darkroom,
photographs swim up from nothing—
darkness holding silver and paper,
transforming grain by grain
under red light’s mercy,
awaiting the bright touch to remember.

Listen:

What is seen is this:
creation requires the quiet canvas
before form appears.

Every seed knows this silent truth,
cracking open in storm-drunk earth.
Every womb practices this first lesson—
how to hold without revealing,
how to nurture what isn’t yet.

Darkness feeds.

Even the darkness between heartbeats
makes the next pulse possible,
the pause that lets blood
remember where to flow,
like weather held in the chest,
about to break.

This is the state before
the great waiting.
Light brings meaning,
makes differences, matters.
But here, it simply is,
has always been,
will be when the last star
admits exhaustion.

Tonight, when you close your eyes,
remember—darkness isn’t taking
sight away. It’s returning you
to the place where vision
means something larger than seeing,

where you sense the curve of space,
the weight of time,
the terrible gentleness
of existing at all—
like thunder that could destroy you
choosing instead to sing.

The storm arrives without warning—
everything that waited
suddenly knows why.
Not blindness
but the ground from which all vision springs.
Not absence but presence
about to know itself.
Not the end of things
but the genesis
that never stopped beginning.

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All content © Charles M. Sumid, [2025]. All rights reserved. This includes all poetry, essays, analyses, and accompanying commentary. Use of this work does not transfer copyright or intellectual property rights.