PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Spiritual jargon is brought to its proper glory with the aid of your eloquence.

Knowing the event that inspired this poem, I would like to tread lightly---commenting with the utmost respect to your Father, and the utmost respect to this poem.  When I was in school, John Milton's elegy, Lycidas, was considered the high point of elegy, but that poem seems stilted and artificial compared to yours.  And this is a lively poem---it does not mourn, but rather, celebrates your Father's life here and his life with God in eternity; and so it offers comfort to all of us who have felt the temporary separation from loved ones and friends, a separation which the Maker of Stars will adjust in Love and Mercy for our eternal happiness.  The center of your poem operates in two lines:  the real side of forever and where there are / no endings.  I applaud the line break in the latter phrase---giving the words "no endings" a single line emphasizes the meaning visually as well as verbally.  (Your poems are full of such subtle strategies, and some enterprising graduate student is going to construct a disseration---and a long one---on that aspect of your Poetry alone.)  And, of course, the final line seals the poem's spiritual grandeur by naming the nature and identity of God:  Love, as the Apostle Saint John has revealed to us.  In that last line of that single, most spiritual and most important word, is an allusion not only to Saint John's first letter, but also the thirteenth chapter of Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthian Christians---the great hymn to Love that was revealed to Him by the Spirit.  And following it, in the fifteenth chapter, is the Hymn of Resurrection; and I cite all of these to say that your Father now sees all of these aspects.

   I should like to say one more thing about that line while you wait for me.  I once heard a very fine sermon that reminded us that there is no time in Heaven---it is of infinite duration.  Therefore, while we here, who are still caught in time, must wait, those who have preceded us there will not have long to wait.  It will seem like only a matter of minutes, to them, who wait for us (to whom, illusively, it may seem like a long time).  So those whom we wait---sometimes for whole lifetimes---to see, will receive us to themselves in what Saint Paul called the blink of an eye.

     That is why I do not say words like, "I am sorry for your loss," very often.  Because, as the devout believer, the actor Peter Cushing once pointed out, our loved ones are not lost (as if misplaced), they are merely temporarily absent from where we are until we shall be where they are.  

      You have honored your Father with this poem; and, honoring him, you have honored God---and that is the chief responsibility of a real Poet.  And you are!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!