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A breathing prayer

was once in my arms

and everything worth anything

was in that minute.

… ah… an entire world of poetic breath, in a compact grain of sand.

This was profoundly beautiful! I felt every line. Such an eclectic mix of imagery 

Worn icons from 

Kisses...

Condensing into one finite minute 

Lovingly distilled iota microbes clamouring into formulaic equations that coalesce into a deep worth more than any idea could encapsulate. 

Always immaculate and well considered

I love how you let me be inside your mind in my own way, a chimera of understanding.

Aptly Jupiter has some big minutes!

Stay proud, 

Best blessings Ss 

I feel as if I am entering church in commenting on this masterpiece...

a sacred relationship between mother and daughter

In Hindu astrology which is the most ancient of all the astrological systems,

Jupiter is the planet which most connects us to God.. through spiritual teachers. it is the planet of the guru. jupiter takes 12 years to go around the sun, approximately a year in each sign. The Sanskrit word for Jupiter is

Brihaspati which means generator of expansion, the opposite of

saturn which is generator of constriction.  Where Jupiter is is spiritual

wisdom, laughter, joy, learning, generosity, love.

"Storms of Jupiter"

https://www.postpoems.org/authors/patriciajj/poem/1103601

My mind loves most the following 3 lines but

the spiritual aspect of this poem is beyond the mind.

'Soon after we emerge into

the seen world,

the Earth-mind sets'

sail and we don't

want it back,

ike an icon worn out

by kisses,

the sky dust is still

holy art:

the visible side of Heaven.

''A breathing prayer 

was once in my arms 

and everything worth anything

was in that minute.'

'

.

Truth learned by running into the its of events blindsided by purity and civilization's gifts. Daughters are up to the challenges as they grow out of you. You get relegated to a useful stair as she opens up her own can of choices.

Stardom has a staircase of prices. Just pay up, step in, arms and armor primed and perfect. Time dents but the pain shows up later, after all the joy and hormonal jubilations. Remind her occasionally she has roots and "home (paraphrased) is where when you come they have to take you in." (Lois McMaster Bujold).

.

Best wishes to you and happy trails to her.

.

Lady A

.

The poignancy of this poem is so powerful that I have to pause to assemble my words about what I want to say.  Frankly, I have two or three poems of my own that I wanted to work on this morning, but this magnificent poem---which, always a day late and a dollar short I approach after unintentional delay---redirects my morning schedule.

   The poem has two centers of gravity, and the first of them is the star trail the poet has walked several times.  Let me amend my metaphor to say the star trail is not just a center of gravity, it is also a foundation on which she has raised the great stucture of this poem.  The Argentinian poet, Borges, once wrote that Dante's Divine Comedy was raised up by that poet, with all of its elaborate structure, for one and only one purpose:  not theological, not political, not even literary (in the sense of showing off Dante's considerable verbal skill, and the use to which he put what was then called the "Sweet New Style").  The purpose was simply to present to us the experience of meeting Beatrice, who was so elevated in his emotions that he set her above the earth, the inferno and Purgatory, so that only God's own Heaven is above Beatrice.  This is what Patriciajj has done, metaphorically, for Jupiter.  She has harnassed the brilliant metaphor of outer space and raised a platform, the star trail into it, in order to receive from Jupiter a vision---a perception---a meaning which affects everything (strangely sketched trees, a noble dog, the planets, and creation, for all its glory, reduced to a micropscopic throught in the presence of the overarching macroscopic concept), the holiness of art, of creation, in the expression of human response to the Divine.  

   I think of two poets here---Lucretius, and his epic poem, De Rerum Natura, and the aforementioned Dante.  Both give us poems about the created world.  But Lucretius' poem has a kind of staleness to it, merely a list of various phenomena which Lucretius attempted to explain scientifically.  Dante gives us similarly elaborate phenomena and explains it in terms of Beatrice; and Dante's poem is not stale, because a relationship thrums at the poem's core, and all of the other literary devices are placed in service of this relationship.

    (I have to pause this comment briefly, as I am being overwhelmed by emotion and I need a moment to steady my nerves.)

    The second center of gravity is the final stanza (like Stevens, Patricia places her poems' centers in various places).  This final stanza not only summarizes the poem, it may in fact summarize the Poet's entire collection.  (I am going to leave that idea to the grad students who will someday be writing dissertations about her work.  They will have to sort all that out, I can only suggest,)

    Juoiter has shown her that everything worth anything has been in that one privileged minute---the way the cosmologists tell us that the entire cosmos, all of the atoms of which everything consists, was one densely packed into a small space the size of a cantelope.  We have all experienced privileged minutes which become more to us than the mere sixty-second intervals that fill our hours in groups of sixty.  We all have felt minutes that are more than minutes---more than mere measurements of time, which is both the movement of the stars, the expansion of the cosmos, and our eventual approach to Heaven.  I believe these special minutes are like Easter Eggs, which the Supreme Creator has placed for us to find, to cherish, and from which we experience a message of love.  I think back to finding gorgeously tinted Easter Eggs cleverly hidden among the various beauties of my grandparents' rural residence, where the egg seemed to emerge from that beauty.  These privileged minutes are symbols of God's love for us, just as the eggs I found in that wonderful place on State Route 4, north of Germantown, had been boiled, dyed, painted, and hidden as expressions of my Grandparents' love for me.  The love is greater than the eggs, but did not disdain to be represented by them.  God's Love is greater than these privileged moments, but does not disdain to be represented by them.  Patricia, being a member of that select group we call the Greatest Poets of our civilization, is very adept at depicted, cataloging, and naming these privileged moments.  That, I believe, is (along with naming the constellations) the first and original purpose of Poetry.  And, at the observation platform on the pinnacle of this metaphoric tower that Patricia has built toward Jupiter, she reveals the true contour and contents of a privileged moment---and, in doing so, fulfills the great effect of Poetry in its original purposes:  to show us---teach us---even compel us---to find, recognize, and cherish those privileged moments in our own lives.  And, in revealing this, she proves herself once more (a proof I have witnessed again and again in her posted poems) to be a Revelatory Poet, not simply a peer of Eliot, Stevens, and Dante, but a spiritual descendent of the Apostle Saint John himself.