Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Darkness
(translated from the Spanish by Rowena Hill)

Look how the twilight dances
among the hypothetical numbers
of dark matter

look how the shadow
mixes and tangles
with its own threads of light
watch how the night camera
tracks the hands
of time as it fades away

it’s darkness
that wants to tell us
that even in the black hole
or in the tightest ring
of midnight
in the void
in the absence of light
there lives happily
at its ease
sometimes distracted
all the luminosity of the world
it’s a butterfly
that descends from the moon
and covers our eyes
to oblige us to see

Nidia Hernández, was born in Venezuela and has lived in the United States since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project, LaMajaDesnuda.com, won the 2011 World Summit Awards, and her radio program, also called La Maja Desnuda, has presented works of the last 35 years with more than 1,820 broadcasts. You can listen to a collection of the programs on the UPV Radio website. Hernández curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press, Boston); belongs to the board of directors of the New England Poetry Club. She is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems by Rafael Cadenas (Arrowsmith Press). In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets (Arrowsmith), which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. The Farewell Light 2024, is her most recent collection of poems published by Arrowsmith Press.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx