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.

First published in Poetry 182:5, August 2003, page 249. In her poem “Mirage” (from Almost an Elegy: New & Later Selected Poems, New York: Norton, 2022, page 28), Pastan wrote “I have been writing about death since / I was not much more than a child.” And in “Women on the Shore” (from Almost an Elegy: New & Later Selected Poems, New York: Norton, 2022, page 39, originally from The Last Uncle, 2002), she wrote, hinting at duende, “If death is everywhere we look, / at least let's marry it to beauty.” Is this darkness?