“What grows in the dark does not ask for a witness.”
He published Sabine’s poems under a small press he founded called No Witness Press . The first run was thirty copies, hand-bound by Will. One found its way to a poet in Montreal, who read it on public radio. Then a scholar in Lyon. Then a filmmaker. Will Power Edward Aubanel
Will smiled. “Because someone had to will her back into the world. And I had the right name for it.” “What grows in the dark does not ask for a witness
Two years later, Sabine Durand’s garden poem was read at a UN climate rally. A high school in Vermont named a library after her. And Will Power Edward Aubanel, standing in the back of a crowded auditorium, watched a ghost take a bow. Then a scholar in Lyon
That night, unable to sleep, Will returned to the library. He began to translate the journal by flashlight. Sabine’s poems weren’t minor at all. They were devastating—about a woman who built a garden in a prison yard, who taught illiterate factory girls to read using smuggled newspapers, who loved another woman and wrote about it as if the sky were a held breath.
Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?”