This layered poem meditates on the act of lighting a candle, both ordinary and profound. It moves from the pragmatic (hydrocarbons, by-products of the ocean bed) to the personal and ancestral, where flame becomes memory, devotion, and continuity. The candle is at once science and symbol: a way to measure time, to honor the dead, to kindle warmth against winter’s dark. Oonah Joslin captures how ritual survives in the smallest of gestures, glowing with both practicality and longing.
I light a candle.
There’s no need
except a desire for flickering
warmth and dancing fire.
I light a candle
watch the primal
space that is infrared
with scientific detachment.
My candle is not tallow
spermaceti or beeswax
but a hydrocarbon
by-product of ocean-bed
long dead; not very romantic,
not very devotional.
I will mark off
feast days in candle hours
invest festive emotion
into each illumination;
invoke times past
and eke the darks days out
with thoughts of
loved ones gone
and loved ones far
and near. Year on year
I light a candle.
There’s no need
except the heart’s deep yearning
for some ancestral hearth.
Oonah Joslin