Eventide

The dark gets a bad rap.

Everyone fawns for the light.

Poets & the Pious are the worst—

rejoice when night is over.

Angels fall to its abyss.

Demons crawl from out.

We’ve been schooled to flinch 

from its embrace.

We forgot its tender

comfort in the womb.

We pity the blind, assume

they’re unable to see.

They are the first to tell you

there’s nothing to fear.

Horror has usurped them

with its guile. Black is cast

as villain. Glory's always white.

Darkness tells it different.

It begets our silhouettes.

Plunges us to passion.

Note your widened

pupils, like a mouth

that’s primed to kiss.

Nighttime is our Cupid

not our keeper.

It is mystery and it is knowledge.

It reveals our cosmic birth.

It sings us clemently to sleep,

shrouds us while we slumber

in the fields.

I’m unable to guess

how it got this way.

Our forebears

had looked up to midnight's

grandeur—never down. 

It’s how we behold the heavens.

Learn we’re not alone.

The truth of a trillion stars.

Now our eyes are ever-

lowered to our screens.

What is it we’re hoping to

find? When wonder’s been

eternally aloft, stood up like

a bride amid a breeze,

longing for her belovѐd

to at last unearth her grace,

there within the shadows in

the moment a candle’s snuffed.

Andreas Gripp

July 26, 2026

photo: FamVeld / Getty Images