N. Scott Thurston isn’t your garden-variety poet. He’s an experimental voice, blending movement, rhythm, and words into something less like a tidy sonnet and more like a storm blowing through the hedgerow. He writes at the edges of silence and sound, where speech falters but the human spirit insists on climbing.
One of his works, Song for a Dark Hour, reads like a wartime hymn caught between despair and defiance. It was written for a shadowed moment in history, but if you squint just right, you’ll see it still fits the cracks of our own times—wherever voices are stifled, and wherever ordinary folks rise as heroes.
I’ll place the poem here in full, each stanza in italics, with my muddy-boot reflections trailing along after, like a dog on a night walk.
But how to recapture the song? My throat has gone
silent;
The music there can find no door to the sky;
There are words in my hands I have lost the power to
fashion—
A thing in my heart that for want of utterance must die.
The song gets stuck. The throat closes. The heart aches to speak but can’t. I know that place—mud in the gears, words stranded on the tongue. But silence is also music. The gap between notes is what makes the melody breathe. Sometimes the stillness is its own kind of song.
O men who pass in the dark, in the falling shadow,
Women who wait in the dimming dusk of the rain,
Who shall speak of the dream that is yours together,
That rises magnificent, wrought of your toil and your
pain?
Here the poet turns outward. Workers trudging home in shadow, women keeping lamps lit in rain. They share a dream not of ease but of endurance. The kind hammered from blistered hands and weary backs. The dream that says: we have suffered, and yet we build.
Children, O little ones, now when the planes go over,
When senseless thunder falls from a beam-lit cloud,
You have peace, little ones, and the hands of Death
are gentle:
You are gone, you are free—you cannot be beaten, be cowed.
The hardest lines to read. Children claimed by war, and yet here the poet finds a soft edge: Death is gentler than bombs. It’s no victory, but it is release. In the darkest hour, comfort is measured differently.
Who shall say that the race of heroes has perished?
One by one, in this hour of fate, in this night,
The heroes, greater than ancient gods in stature,
Mount from their agony—steps that climb to the light.
And then, light. Not from Olympian gods, but from ordinary folk in agony—welders, farmers, nurses, mothers—mounting from pain toward something higher. These are the heroes who rise not by miracle but by persistence. The poem insists: the race of heroes is not done.
So ends Song for a Dark Hour. It begins with silence and ends with ascent. It reminds me that sometimes the song isn’t sung—it’s lived. The plowed furrow, the shared loaf, the hand clasped in grief. That’s music enough to carry us through the dark.
That’s all I have to say, I will say no more.
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