What the Nighttime Brought

This countryside, known for its emptiness, was, after the hours of daylight,

filled with a darkness so impenetrable we viewed it with fear and wonder.

And when the wind streamed into the night, it brought with it all manner

of creatures, monsters, ghosts who guffawed, screeched, clanked and roared

in the hedgerows, the trees, took possession of outhouses, clambered over roofs,

slithered under doors, howled down chimneys, loitered along the roadsides.

Few had the gift of seeing into that dark, but old James Guihan saw. In our kitchen,

he told us of the mad woman who walked the cur wolf on the end of a rope,

came into our garden on September nights to steal our apples, and the Pooka’s

red eyes that sometimes flashed in at a window, so children must stay in their beds

because those eyes lured boys and girls to the undergound homes of fairies from which

they never returned. He told us about the banshee whose wails presaged a death,

and the lowlifes whose trade entailed their poking in the hedges for strays and runaways,

and his warning that only our night prayers kept us safe in our beds.

Still, night after night, we braved the bedroom window, the thinness of its glass,

to gaze into the pitch-blackness that chased our days away. We looked out

to where the familiar fields had been, trees we climbed, the sheds that were our forts,

saw nothing, and were terrorized by the uncertainty of the world we thought was ours.