By day give thanks, by night beware
 Half the world in sweetness, the other in fear

 When the darkness takes you, with her hand across your face
 Don't give in too quickly, find the things she's erased

   Find the line, find the shape through the grain
   Find the outline and things will tell you their name

 The table, the guitar, the empty glass
 All will blend together when the daylight has passed

   Find the line, find the shape through the grain
   Find the outline and things will tell you their name

 Now I watch you falling into sleep
 Watch your fist uncurl against the sheet
 Watch your lips fall open and your eyes dim
 In blind faith

 I would shelter you
 And keep you in light
 But I can only teach you
 Night vision
 Night vision
 Night vision

I like everyday poems. Of course, I also like love poems, and war poems, metaphysicals and the Movement, irreverent flights of whimsy and dense conglomerations of weighty syllables. But there’s a special place in my affections for poems that celebrate the simple, the ordinary, the casual - and which do so in such a manner as to offer a new way of seeing them.

Today’s poem is one such. Who hasn’t reflected on the way things look after the lights have been turned out? The strange shapes furniture and fabric take, the patterns of moonlight and shadow rippling across walls and floor, the reflected images in mirrors, the silhouettes of lamps and bookshelves and chairs and vases… at night, reality itself seems to ‘suffer a sea-change / into something rich and strange’¹.

And Vega captures this. “Night vision” is a song² that combines the magic of darkness with the tenderness and poetry of love, and it’s wonderfully, wonderfully done.

— Thomas