Paul Brookes’ ‘We Wait for Sick Sunblaze to’ is an ode to darkness – and a critique of light in comparison – which manages to transcend the usual tawdry and overtly-gothic glorifications that poets often sink into. Brookes speaks of darkness in a way that makes the reader feel as though it were usurped; deposed and bereft of the credit it deserves – for life and love’s intensity are born from dark rooms; where light brings pain, age and death.
The last third of this poem is particularly poignant, I feel; when Brookes’ Copernican revolution of the light/dark dichotomy takes a turn for the theological that could be taken as either highly blasphemous, or a profoundly pious and honest form of doxology…
Let us know what you think below!
– The Bees Are Dead Triumvirate
Many thanks to the superb “The Bees Are Dead” for publishing my “We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To”
The Wombwell Rainbow 