In Their Own Words
Aimee Nezhukumatathil on “Nocturne for Dark Things”
Nocturne for Dark Things
I do my finest listening in the dark.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life—
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep
tucked under a giraffe’s dusky armpit
and sometimes fungi fatten only at night.
When I was a kid, I used to worry over
so many bugs and moths slamming
into our windshield. My sons have never
known that concern, which is another kind
of worry. But dark marvels still bloom
and snick the soil, swim the oceans and air—
and even on the moon: wide, flat plains
are called seas, lakes, and marshes. Bays
are named Joy, named Sorrow, named Hope,
named Nectar, named Softness, named Serpent,
named Stickiness, named Tranquility, named
Clouds, named Sleep, and my favorite—named Love.
From Night Owl (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins). Copyright © by 2026 Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted with permission.
On “Nocturne for Dark Things”
I do my finest listening in the dark. That first line arrived with the kind of certainty I’ve learned to be patient for. Not because I had solved anything groundbreaking, but because since I was a little girl, night has long been the hour when the world’s noise loosens its grip, and smaller, weirder truths step forward. In daylight, I can be too quick to name or explain. At night, I am more willing to be quiet enough for a poem to find me.
“Nocturne for Dark Things” grew out of that feeling. I wanted to write toward darkness without making it only a metaphor for fear or grief. So much of the living world depends on shadow, hush, and the unseen. Birds sleeping tucked beneath a giraffe’s dusky armpit. Fungi swelling after sundown. The moon with its “seas” and “marshes” and “bays” named for feelings as tender and sticky and human as Love, Softness, Sorrow. I wanted the poem to move by accumulation, one marvel after another—if each image were gently setting the next one on the table at a feast.
I think of poems like this as little lanterns, though that may sound odd for a poem so interested in the dark. What I mean is that this poem I think does not try to flood everything with light. It only wants to light the way just enough for us to notice what is already alive and functioning there. That shaped the form for me. The lines are short and open enough to let each image breathe, and I wanted the leaps between them to feel associative rather than argumentative. A nocturne, after all, should drift a little.
The pressure point beneath the poem is worry—first my childhood worry over moths and bugs imploding as they strike the windshield of our moving car, and now a different worry that my sons have grown up in a world where there aren’t nearly as many insects as there were say forty years ago. But I didn’t want worry to be the poem’s final note. I wanted wonder to keep its place at the table, too.
Writing this poem is what first clicked open that I wanted to gather up my other poems around the idea of night into a book and made me understand what night offers me most: a way to hold worry and astonishment in the same palm, the same poems, the same poetry collection. I hope this poem invites readers to linger for a moment—to look again at what thrives in darkness, and to remember that not everything hidden is lost. The world after the sun goes down is still busy making itself beautiful.
