Light, Darkness and the Right to Rest

Light opened through the deep:  
distinction—energy arriving,  
matter answering, visibility carried  
without a watching owner.

Light crossed the field before a face could see it.  
Particles held and scattered what they received;  
distance became depth, and depth became colour.  
Stone warmed. Water gathered moving gold.  
Green forms would later turn that gift  
to sugar, fibre, fruit and breathing bodies.

Where light withdrew, darkness gathered other work.  
Heat left the stone. Moisture entered soil.  
Unopened life assembled past the reach  
of immediate inspection. Cooling, sleep,  
gestation and repair found room to happen  
without performance before another gaze.

Their alternation gave the world its rhythm.  
Morning opened movement; evening loosened  
the hand from what one day could not complete.  
Time entered as return, not as a ladder  
on which each hour must prove a higher yield.  
Rest became part of making before labour  
had any language for exhaustion.

The Source called light good without requiring  
its reach to spread through every living chamber.  
Darkness was good where hidden form required it.  
Each held a limit shaped by what it served.  
The first recurring mercy was this rhythm:  
activity released before it hardened  
into the only evidence of life.

Variation entered with the changing angle.  
Red gathered near the setting light; blue deepened  
where evening made the distant air more dense.  
Moth, seed, root and waking eye received  
different conditions from the same full field.  
Beauty began as fit relation,  
not as a contest underneath a gaze.

The cooling ground lay ready for a body,  
already able to hold its rest till morning.

The first full cycle closed. The river darkened,  
not into absence, but another mode  
of presence. What had opened under light  
continued where no witness could improve it.