Night Burst

Photo by Gabrielle Johnson, Chasing Horizons Photography

A Poem by Chelsea Fraser

“Oh, night more lovely than the dawn”

— St. John of the Cross, from “Dark Night of the Soul”

My form was made in darkness. 

I was not a daisie daughter 

sprouting sunshine from my pores,

wooing grown-ups with my ringlets

and delighting them. Not the gentle peony, 

nor yet the iris growing stately tall. 

I was no floral bouquet, no greenhouse variety

for I knew no greenhouse. 

Our garden burst—

it was not a tidy planted home

with weeded beds pristine. 

No tended roses sent their sweetened

perfume on our days. 

Dim-lit back rooms filled with dust

and slumbering sadness, sowing dreams

to hold the darkness at bay

and waking to a twilight—

but no half-sun flowers blossomed there

to thrive. Just hardy daughters

growing in the night. 

I was not bursting,

a budding daffodil, poking out of snow;

was not a dappled orchid blessed

within community. If I grew, I was holly, 

tough, and deeply evergreen, formed 

in dusk and cold with berries 

bright and small 

that sometimes burst—

Under fluorescent lights, the mother 

bore some time in that anti-greenhouse 

of a hospital, wearing floral gowns 

or later, plain petals that showed 

the color in her eyes had not faded, 

and my relentless mother willed a garden 

to grow anew. Her garden, full of daughters, 

then full of sons, then full of grandsons—

climbing ivy and purple wisteria and 

yellow jessamine that outshines summer 

in brilliant bursts—

For if I bloom, it’s daffodils, a shock of clover, 

Forget-me-nots—I am the blooms no dark will touch, 

no too-hot sun can scorch. I lift my head 

full of wishes and seeds and shake them everywhere

to watch them burst—

The soil of my childhood rooted deep

empathy and resilience, in the dusk

of illness and despair that fought the blight

and won. Our home repaired its garden beds

and saw the Sun return again and again, 

and again we knew the hope of Eden, 

the night that knows its end, the earth 

so covered with flowers and

so full of light, it bursts!

Chelsea Fraser is a writer and arts administrator from South Carolina and has been published in Ekstasis Magazine, The Dewdrop, Vessels of Light Journal, Persephone Literary Magazine, and The Way Back to Ourselves Literary Journaland has been a featured poet at Christianity Today’s Inkwell arts events. Her debut poetry collection, The Mother Tree, is published through “vine & shoots publishing,” and you can find her at www.chelseafraserwrites.com