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I The Asking 

After having retired to the place I had designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. (JS—H 1:15-17) 

All that has gone before makes the now, somehow.
Whys are sucked deep into the darkened spirit’s
black hole where desperate reaching retrieves 
distraught questions from God’s battered children.
Response comes in increments, 
not yes or no, butmaybe, no matter, not yet. 

Born through a veiled past 
we experiment upon the Word; 
begin the long quest to fade shadow into light 
only to realize, when the tests 
and pleadings for help are done, 
that we have to write our own answers. 

II The Setting 

How long will you choose darkness rather than light? (Hel. 13:29) 

Disembodied in darkness 
            sightless 
                        there is only what we feel 
                                    what we grapple for 

Actors, chained to fear, 
            flailing ourselves with other’s lives 
                        performing on an unlit stage, 
                                    the curtains closed 

Voices of an invisible audience 
            taunting 

III The Awakening 

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. (Isa. 9:2) 

Let us chant a litany to day 
with its certainty of sun 
its lavishness of light; 
to fires that appease the specter of night; 
to the spark within 
that is the hugeness of us all, 
that lights our dreams, our visions 
and causes us to yearn 
for an unfathomable love. 

IV The Testing 

The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed. (D&C 88:13) 

Why not a passion for the source 
to counter dark’s obsession? 
See how lightning lashes at the night, 
how the prudent carry lanterns into caves 
to wrestle both angels and demons, 
how focused beams transform matter.

Wave, particle, quantum, 
aspects of the whole. 
In a universe made of 
shards of shattered stars 
the shadows the light. 

V Double Helix 

We were in the beginning. Intelligence, or the light of truth was not cre ated or made, neither indeed can be. The body filled with light compre hends all things. (D&C 88:67) 

We come knowing 
            but don’t know we know 
                        eons encrypted, spiraled 
                                    inside us, encoded in an 
                                                infinitude of atomic light 
                                    Intervolved between shadow 
                        and sun, life breeds in darkness, 
            intaglioed leaves dying 
their golden death crumble 
            and decay into the entropic 
                        dregs that infuse nascent 
                                    roots with opposed force 
                                                to push stems, leaves 
                                    flowers towards visible 
                        light, while we, in the 
            night, like blossoms 
triggered by dusk 
            effloresce dreams and 
                        visions illumined from 
                                    within to bloom in the 
                                                gardens in our minds 
                                                            Let there be light and 
                                    there was . . . is . . . in 
                        all things, through 
all things, brilliant, bright