In My Darkest Hours by Mary Willette Hughes

by | Dec 1, 2019 | Sunday Morning Lyricality | 0 comments

Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, featuring a weekly song or poem by a Minnesota writer.

Poets are able to manipulate all of human experience, even the pain of grief, into art, each in their idiosyncratic way. This poem by Mary Willette Hughes reminds us that when we don’t know where to turn, there is prayer, and there are poems. These can comfort us, not with easy answers, but with a listening presence, a reminder that we are part of something larger than our own small, yet inexplicably important, life.

–Tracy Rittmueller

In My Darkest Hours
Mary Willette Hughes

I enter a galaxy of poetry. And like stars,
poems flicker ageless
truth across the night. I whisper poems,
familiar as daily prayers
slipping through my mind, giving solace
line by line, moving like 
rosary beads in my finger. Poems
ease my soul as I pray for peace
to hover our world, our family. Prayers
offer assurance and calm
like memorized poems that are as faithful
as the sun’s dawning light.
Do you understand how we revolve with
the sun, the moon, the earth
that spin us and our dark lives to orbit each
night? Yet, they will pause
and curve to listen if we tell our one small life. 

Mary Willette Hughes is a two-time recipient (1998 and 2010) of Central Minnesota Arts Board Individual Artists Grant for Poetry. She was awarded a Public Service Award from the National Association of Poetry Therapy for her work in the St. Cloud Hospital’s Recovery Plus program for addiction/recovery and has published three collections of poems, Quilt Pieces, Flight on New Wings, and The Shadow Loom Poems. She lives in Waite Park, and is a member of Grand View Poets, a chapter of The League of Minnesota Poets.
"In My Darkest Hours" first appeared in Light: A Tiny Book of Lyricality, ©2019.