PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Your words ask for guidance, and then lead this reader to wander through haunting phrases, adorned by beautiful images, manifesting themselves into the rebirth of faith, understanding, and the acceptance of life itself.  Thank you for sharing your journey.   

It's always a pleasure to visit here, thank you for sharing your talent.  

I'll mark it read but I need to come back and describe your brilliance when I have the meat that your bones have brought to my mind.

Awesome...

In this poem, Patricia begins by personalizing Stillness, and inviting it to tell her about itself.  But Stillness remains silent, and the Poet speaks for it, and speaks with both authenticity and authority.  And in doing this, she confirms my own personal belief that Poets like her, Poets who view reality from a cosmic viewpoint (and Patricia has as much of a cosmic viewpoint as the James Webb and Edwin Hubble space telescopes) have a vocation to explain the Cosmos to itself.  We, humanity, are the consciousness and conscience of the Cosmos; and the Poets among us perform that function to the highest degree.  

In the center of the poem, she mentions the particle of Faith, which gives her a power over, and a keen awareness of, her environment which she describes under various forms that the poem lists.  And with this particle of Faith, she realizes God's eminence and imminence in everything.  God's presence is marked in, and borne witness to, by all created things---whether sentient or not.  And pointing this out is part of the Poet's task of explaining the cosmos to itself.  

The poem's triumphant conclusion occupies the final eight lines, and she realizes that despite the apparent darkness, the Light remains present.  She reminds us that neither she, nor any of us, ever leave the Light.  The sky always contains Light---of the Sun, and Moon, and Stars---and even if it is sometimes obscured by cloudy weather, it is there nevertheless.  I remember the first time, as a small child, that I saw the Moon visible during daylight hours.  It is a rare phenomenon in my part of the world, but it has happened from time to time.  And then I learned that the stars never stop shining on to the Earth; the daytime presence of our local Star obscures the others, but their Light continues to arrive.  We are never out of the Light, because when our souls are released from our bodies, they are called into Light.

I like the interpretation of the Orthodox Church that both Heaven and Hell are both functions of God's Light nature.  Those who die in peace with God bask in that Light, and find it a blissful, or heavenly, experience.  Those who choose to be at odd with God, shun the Light because they find it agonizing, and that is Hell.  Unlike both Dante and Milton, both of whom I admire less now than I did as a student, Hell is not a separated place or even an independent realm; it is a state of the soul, just as Heaven is.  And this concept, without either theological or deonimnational terms, is operative in this poem.  The Poet has always been, and never departs, from the Light, despite the obscurity that sometimes intervenes.  And it is this abiding presence of the Light that she now explains to the Cosmos, and to us who hang on her every word.

Scholars speak about the Cosmologies of the greatest Poets---Vergil, Dante and Milton (whom I have previously mentioned), Eliot, Pound and Stevens.  Not all Poets construct a cosmology in their Poetry, but the greatest of them do.  Patricia does, as well, and therefore has proven, time and again, her qualification to be nummbered among the greatest of those Cosmic Poets.  There is a Cosmology of astrophysics, of metaphysical philosophy, and of Poetry.  Patricia's Poems, and the cosmology she constructs within them, are a textbook-perfect example of how it is done; also a textbook-perfect example of how rarely it is done.  And Patricia does it well, always well.

It is a privilege to have read this magnificent Poem.