The darkest evening of the year,
Nothing has come yet,
And evening is here.
The darkest evening of the year.

Though I have stopped, the evening has not.
The sun, a giant mass, plummets slowly,
Moves lower and lower and lower.
Depriving the cold day of the little heat it sought.

Everything seems closer in the dim.
The woods span out around me,
They approach closer and closer and closer.
I allow my tired brain its whim.

My feet have not moved,
Though I feel I’ve gone into the woods.
It’s darker here, my eyes can’t adjust,
I’m seeing spots, my vision confused.

Nothing has come yet,
But I’m waiting for nothing.
And nothing is here so,
I should continue but I’m locked in the sunset.

I must leave, while I’m still awake.
Or give in, and let sun and sight leave me behind.
————————————my horse disagrees.
He gives his harness bells a shake

Daniel Triumph.

This piece was taken from a creative writing project I’m doing with my creative writing class. It’s kind of cool, so I’ll explain. (Also, I came up with the concept!)

First, we chose a poem with enough lines for the entire class. The poem used was Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Each person was given a pair of lines from that poem, and they had to write their own poem in between the lines. I got lines 8 and 9: “The darkest evening of the year.” and “He gives his harness bells a shake.” You can see those are my first and last lines.

There weren’t any other constraints except that it had to be fairly short.

What we as a class are working to do now is compile everyone’s piece into a little book. It’ll be kinda cool, because the last line of one person’s poem becomes the first line of the next one, and so on until the entire Frost poem has been covered. What this means is that the table of contents will read exactly like Robert Frost’s piece!