Black

Black,
in myriad forms, a cloak of endless hues,
Atramentous shadows bleed into the edges of my sight,
the charcoal sketch of a dying day,
a dying planet,
a dying world,
its ember-soft remains against the duskiness of the sky.

Coal lies buried deep,
smirched by the weight of time,
inky veins,
midnight rivers of what’s forgotten,
flowing beneath the crust of eons.
A pitch-thick silence hangs,
funereal smoke drifts,
from singed dreams and ashen hopes.

Sable night, swathed in swarthiness,
an obsidian sheen reflects my sombrous heart.
The niello of stars burns faintly,
silver smirks against my melanotic skin.
And the raven, with wings of denigration,
cuts through this inkiness,
a fleeting shadow across the moon’s pale face.

Swartness lingers,
tar-like,
clinging to breath and thought.
It is the soot of forgotten fires,
the ebony truth that loiters
long after the flame.

Once, the crows spoke of melanism,
their voice a funereal hymn to the sloe fruit’s bitter bite,
the kind that stains lips with its essence.
Even the smoke whispers of this:
the ink of words left unwritten,
the obsidian shards of dreams.

There is beauty in this world,
in the raven-black canopy of stars,
in the singe of forgotten coal,
in the darksomeness of wild things.
Ebony branches claw at the sky,
by a dusky sun that fades into jet-streaked horizons.

Darkness is not emptiness;
it is the fullness of mystery.
A sombrous smoke that curls upward
like a prayer,
unanswered,
but still offered.

Black is a world entire,
a raven’s cry in a midnight forest,
a smirch that marks the soul
and makes it whole.