"Candlelight does not lift the covers over the one who is lost alone in the past or present; it lifts the covers of the faces that remain beside you as you sit or lie awake late into the night, witnessing their bodies melting drop by drop.
The candle is the light in liquid shape, is a light inside night, or light weeping, or light wiping its eyes with the edge of a distant star, or light dressed in a nightgown, or night when its desires have awoken . . ."
By Ali Ahmed Said Esber (adonis) translated from Arabic. A contemporary poet, he was born in western Syria in 1930. Other writings can be seen here..
Candles have long been lighting the dark of nights: from reeds coated in tallow by the Egyptians, beeswax in the middle ages (which burned cleaner than tallow), boiled bayberries' wax in colonial times, spermaceti wax (crystallized sperm whale oil), to modern paraffin -- with stearic acid added, made from oil and coal shales, to raise the melting point.
Find some sand on the beach of ocean or river and build a fire, preferably at night for nice shadows.
Place paraffin or old candles in a metal coffee can on the fire to melt it (paraffin used to be in every grocery store because the ladies would use it melted to seal the jars of processed food for storage in the cellar. Since the advent of nice self-sealing lids on Ball jars the old method is not used much anymore.)
Take a stick or the wine bottle you brought and poke holes in the sand into which the melted wax is poured. When wax is hardened, remove from the beach. Wicks can be added later with a drill bit for a hole into which they are placed.
The sand sticks to the wax to make the infamous Sand-Cast Candle (not sold in stores).
We still have one made in the black sand of the western Columbia river north of Portland Oregon:
We were not sure why the sand was dark there but posited that perhaps further upstream near the Columbia River, volcanic action may have taken place previous.
