Mike Stone's "Darkness" opens with a riddle about mirrors and ends on a question about death. Between them runs one quietly uncomfortable observation: we are generous with beauty when it belongs to trees, gems and skies, and stingy with it when it belongs to people.
The first stanza sets the terms. Darkness is "like the king's mirror," which suggests a mirror owned by power, the kind we expect to flatter. It does something odd, though. It "absorbs our veritas" and "reflects our vanitas": truth swallowed, vanity handed back. The Latin helps. *Veritas* and *vanitas* differ by only a few letters and chime like a rhyme, so truth and vanity look like near-twins, the way a reflection resembles us but isn't quite us. *Vanitas* also means emptiness as well as self-regard, and that second meaning quietly sets up the poem's final word. Then comes the walk: "our thoughts / On a long and solitary walk / Reflect reality." The phrasing is deliberately flat and slow ("The way in which"), as if the sentence were itself strolling. The comparison is unsettling too. A mind wandering alone does reflect the world, but it also tidies and edits it, so "reflect" starts to sound like "distort."
At "I've often wondered why," the voice turns from the riddle to plain speech. The poem is free verse, with no regular rhyme or metre. Its line lengths swing from the clipped "But not gnarled hands," to the long, slightly breathless "And the imperfection within the diamond." That irregularity suits a speaker thinking aloud, and it echoes the solitary walk of the first stanza.
The core of the poem is a series of four pairs, built like a small experiment. In each pair one word stays fixed (*gnarled*, *lonely*, *imperfection*, *emptiness*) while only the noun changes. By holding the quality constant, the poem shows that the quality was never the issue. What matters is who owns it. Gnarled wood is picturesque, but gnarled hands, which carry age and labour, are something we would rather not look at. The willow's loneliness is easy to love, and the word may carry its familiar association with sorrow, but a lonely poet is an awkward person to sit beside.
The pairs also escalate. The loved things move from living trees to a mineral and then to the open sky, becoming steadily more distant and inanimate. The feared things move steadily inward and onward: hands, then a poet's life, then the soul, then death. A jeweller might object that flaws lower a diamond's worth, and this is the poem's most arguable claim. It works better if we read the flaw as what makes one stone individual. The last pair is held back by a line break after "And why we love," a small pause before "The emptiness of unclouded skies." The sky is praised as bright and open, yet it is still empty, and by the end the poem has travelled from darkness to light without leaving emptiness behind.
The speaker's puzzlement is also slightly disingenuous, because the first stanza has already supplied the answer. If the dark mirror absorbs truth and returns vanity, then we love whatever flatters us. A tree cannot accuse us, and a diamond cannot remind us of our own flaws. The hand, the poet, the soul and death are the *veritas* that gets swallowed. Nature is easy to love because it asks nothing of us, while people demand recognition.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is short and nearly bare of ornament, with plain English for intimacy and two Latin words for weight. It offers no moral at the end, only the word "death" and a silence after it. The reader is left to run the experiment on themselves, picking a flaw they admire in a landscape and asking whether they could admire it in a face.