My Life in the Light: a poem in the voice of Carol Anne from Poltergeist, once grown

🌚 Happy New Moon! Guest post from Heather Davis

From Chad:

Heather Davis organizes the writing group that meets at our coworking space. It was her prompt, almost a year ago, that spurred me to write a Letter to Interdependence and start thinking about Scientific Animist poetry. Heather offered a perfect mid-winter poem that I intended to publish in January, but then I got bogged down by holidays and busyness and giving into the urge to go dark during the darkest time of year, and I forgot! Sorry, Heather! Lucky for us, Heather is generous and prolific and also had a good almost-Spring poem to offer. 🖤🩶🤍

From Heather:

It’s interesting to think about the values we assign to light and dark. Is one better than the other? Are they both necessary and beautiful? Are they both scary at times?

The movie Poltergeist must have made a big impression on me—I was a teen when it came out. Asked to think about the turn from light to dark for a winter solstice event I was attending, I immediately heard the voice of Carol Anne’s mother, pleading with her daughter to “run to the light.”

Having been abducted by a demonic Poltergeist at the age of 12, what would Carol Anne be like as a grown-up? How would she feel about “the light”?

I am a light freak—I love lots of sunlight streaming into my house. I turn on lights and open blinds. I grafted that onto Carol Anne. And like her, I also have gone through periods where light was the enemy, when another day and more sun seemed like a horrible burden. I felt ready to stay in the dark then.

Maybe Carol Anne felt this too. I hope her character was able—eventually—to appreciate the ways that dark and light depend on each other; to embrace all of it with some level joy, even having known demons—or maybe because of them.

That time I was smoking and accidentally lit my hair on fire. 
My friends laughed, but it could have kept us warm. 
That other time a beautiful man and I stayed up all night, 
watching artsy movies, then stumbled to a diner 
bathed in dawn’s yellow-orange-fuchsia-pink. How I 
compulsively open curtains and blinds, as if needing 
to photosynthesize my life. How I gravitate beachward 
as the planet tilts, chasing August’s peerless burn. This 
is the time of year I hear my mother’s voice: Run 
to the light, baby. Run into the light, Carol Anne. And yet, 
something holds me back, not the Beast, as you’ve been told, 
but a deliciousness I can’t explain. I want to linger 
in winter a little longer, soak in its lack of brightness 
except for stars, its obsidian all cusp, lovely because we 
know how and when it will end—that way our turn 
to illumination will be sweeter. I will never forget, 
after being lost in my own room for months, like a girl 
stuck down a well and impossible to reach, the moment 
the meds kicked in and pulled me out, that instant of rising 
when I opened to the sun and daylight seemed miraculous, 
a good thing you’d want to dance with instead of run from.