Author Information
Theater of Shadow and Light
In darkness
I knew I could reach
the light
if I could be
the night: that empty,
that immaculately quiet.
A crisp and sunken moon
knows how it's done—
she quivers in the
touch of pines and
floats on star love and
one slow-turning
frame of eternity,
and so safe,
like an angel, from
this angry little world
I sacrificed another one
of my lives to . . .
until I remembered,
I never age,
I just begin again,
and there's always one
more beginning. Just ask
the mumbling ghosts
on the river,
casting silk,
reshaping moons,
doing what creators
do,
so I might
as well try on
something impossible,
remembering how I once
believed existence
in this world was a
tragic carnival—
ghoulish laughter,
circles of loss,
an ingenious trap—
till I began again.
Some say Rumi's teacher
died for the privilege
of loving him—
oh, to love so much
that losing yourself
is gaining it all . . .
I could fly apart
in this freedom,
in this shell
of dark purity,
showered by messengers
of light, I allowed,
at last,
through the floor
of Heaven.
Die again,
they say,
die once more,
and be born.
Patricia Joan Jones
Hello
I found this poet in a round about and back to the beginning way. While looking through your work I saw the Instagram link . There I saw a poem that said it was from this poem. So back i come and find this lovely poem in its entirety. NIce images nice flow I never know as you do how to critic except this speak to me. Nicely done and i love the Instagram poem format. I will visit there as well.
Quivers in the touch of pine Nice
Debbie
First, thank you for visiting
First, thank you for visiting my Instagram feed. Instagram is fast becoming my favorite platform for my work, although I still love all the talented and encouraging poets here. Thank you also for coming back here to read the entire poem and leave such beautiful and supportive feedback. Coming from such a fine poet, that means so much!
Renewal As Reincarnate
So many parts wear out and need refurbishing which only addresses the surface. Renaissance has distinction of a do over, wiser, shell-shed, ready to greet anew the moon , the stars, and Sol. The transition is the bear rider. To begin again - slough off the last incarnation and return a new model with no erring or mistake scarification. If only. ~(:D)
Thank you for that amazing, I
Thank you for that amazing, I mean, stunning perspective on my work. It means so much. My deepest gratitude.
The spiritual center of the
The spiritual center of the poem is in the second stanza, and in your splendid metaphor about the moon. The lines that follow are an unfolding of that slow turn of the frame of eternity, or, else, a tracing of that frame as it turns. A delicate clockwork movement propels each of your lines into the next one, in a conversational tone that engages the cosmos itself as it speaks to us of mysteries most people do not attempt to contemplate much less study and describe, as you do. As I read through this, I found myself constantly reminded of T.S. Eliot's poem, Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, not because of anything as trite as quoting from it or imitating it (your poetic work is far evolved beyond those things), but because the cosmic reach of your greatness is very much like his was. Your verbal abilities are at the degree of greatness where mere superlatives become unstable and fall apart; at that point, the careful reader is compelled to make comparisons in an attempt to locate this poem, or any of your poems, on the ever expanding scale of your tremendous achievement.
J-Called
I'm going to have to invent a
I'm going to have to invent a new word for gratitude, because I honestly can't express how much your grasp of my vision and your support has meant to me. Thank you for such a priceless and brilliantly expressed analysis. And again, thank you.
While I admire, and always
While I admire, and always will admire, the superlative quality of your poetry---and I just can't say enough about it---I also secretly envy (by anticipation) the scholar who will write the first full length study of your poetry. And I know this is going to happen in the future, someday and somewhere. I am sure that, in 1914, an awkward graduate philosophy student, at Oxford in England, and a discontented insurance lawyer, in New York, were not anticipating that their poems would someday COMMAND whole English departments and multitudes of doctoral dissertations; and yet, we now know that this really happened. The same is in your poems' future, and, like I said, I do envy the scholar who will write the first explication of your work.
J-Called
My appreciation reaches
My appreciation reaches deeper, higher and wider than I can express. I wouldn't be surprised if some of your stellar works live on in posterity. My far-reaching gratitude . . .