Too Much Light - David Boomer

I.

There are people who enter our lives

like half-broken lanterns—

light carried in shoeboxes,

filled with waxy stamps,

dust of roads no map remembers.

II.

Earl—

your name a syllable of soil,

yet you carried it

into the mountains of Afghanistan.

A first-year volunteer,

pockets empty,

hands full of chalk and longing.

People looked at you as if language

were a small bright stone

you could press into their palms.

III.

Behind you,

the Buddhas of Bamiyan—

long gone now,

but in your memory still

their vast calm faces,

eyes like the shape of silence

before the dawn prayer.

Even stone, you thought,

could teach endurance.

IV.

Later, the shoebox filled with trinkets:

a beaded bracelet from the road to Jalalabad,

a coin rubbed thin in the Kabul bazaar,

train tickets south

to Goa’s endless beaches

where light was not a gift

but a burden.

V.

Too much light,

too much nirvana,

too much emptiness upon return.

For what can America do

with a young man who has seen

desert blue as a hymn,

stood in the hollows of monasteries,

carried the laughter of children

like kites against gunmetal skies?

VI.

You came back with pockets torn,

silence folded deep into your coat.

Your friends did not know what to ask.

You said little—

only once, perhaps,

that you had been a teacher,

a humanitarian,

a traveller who believed one life

was enough to lean against the world

like a staff against the shoulder

of a weary man.

VII.

Now your name is a faint circle

pressed into the album

of another man’s youth.

But tonight I take it down,

blow the dust away,

and hold it in my palm.

Not stone, not sand,

not the brass trinkets you carried,

but something rarer—

the reminder that one life,

even when it falls silent,

can be a lamp

still burning

in another’s dark.

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David Brickey Bloomer is a humanitarian practitioner, writer, and photographer whose work moves between conflict zones, disaster landscapes, and the fragile spaces of everyday recovery. A flâneur by temperament and a storyteller by necessity, he is drawn to the quiet gestures of resilience that persist in difficult places. His poetry and photography emerge from more than two decades of humanitarian work across South and Southeast Asia. Often working in hybrid form, he pairs lyric fragments with documentary images to explore memory, loss, and the uneasy hope that survives in their aftermath. His work can be found at davidbrickeybloomer.com and on Substack at @davidbrickeybloomer