Author Information
The View from Below
Folder:
Dark Poetry Sky dwellers,
star walkers,
those that catch and rule the air above.
Born human,
reborn as arrows.
Fly, brave ones and tell me how
we look down here on this
scrap-fabric ground you could rip apart
and rearrange if you wished to.
Do we look like baffled mice in a
lab--no reward in sight, ultimate fools,
or more entertaining beasts in a zoo
who need reasons for the bars
our eyes open to each day?
Why do we insist there must be reasons?
Do other shameless mammals ponder
their fate?
Even the tiger obsessing in his cell,
never seeing the futility of his
ritual dance questions the madness or
feels the rage that is almost a
celebration; rage with a hunger,
zodiac-bright, godlike, sulfur driving
the blood like a slave; rage that
seeps out with your sweat, each glistening
bead, questioning, demanding.
Does the pathetic, flaming beast
say I don't want this moment or the next?
How can he give his blessing to the
tyrannous life that owns him?
Such agony in knowing just enough to keep
us asking.
The flies are at peace while the masters,
the titans, are bewildered.
Time, a coveted possession.
Time, brightest angel bearing answers;
when those that rule the sky and those
that harvest dust are equals,
this patron saint of the reluctant living,
this avenger of the bewildered
will have our hearts.
I remember how small my great-grandmother
looked at 99, how she shrank before my
eyes, so tiny next to the life behind her.
How still, the ruins behind us.
What eloquent quiet, the years past:
certainty enshrined forever in the dark
spaces of our mind.
What do you see, human arrows, beside you?
A tribe of vultures that finds us all?
Leave them to their sacred work, so
in the last crystal gasp of evening,
I might fly like you.
by Patricia Joan Jones
This poem, posted years ago,
This poem, posted years ago, shows an amazing aspect of your work---a consistency, as if you simply stepped into your greatness and began to write the marvelous lines and phrases of which ALL your poems consist. I have never read or seen a lame or botched line in any of your poems. They are all gems, and the wonder of gems is their great variety, and your poems are like that. But the artistic polish and finesse with which those gems are presented to your readers is always refreshingly, assuringly, and comfortingly the same---that is, at the highest degree of quality. Someday, for sure, some excitied PhD. candidate is going to write the first dissertation (first of many dissertations) on your poetry, and the reward of writing about your poems will be tremendous indeed.
Starward
I'm thrilled that you
I'm thrilled that you unearthed some of my older works that seemed to have been sitting dormant on my sites for years. I remembered the fierce emotions that tormented me when I wrote this, and I had no idea then that someday someone would appreciate it so much. I'm now so glad that I picked up that pen and scribbled my heart out. God bless you for making me feel that I write for a reason. God bless you for making me want to write more.
Thank you for your kind
Thank you for your kind reply, and I want to use this opportunity to capitalize on a phrase in that replt, for benefit of tgise reader who may subsequently read this comment. And I am being redudndant, well, greatness such as yours NUST be acknowledged repeatedly. Of course you write for a reason. I have said, elsewhere, that the cosmos was created in all its splenor and beauty to be commented on by our species (I do not believe in extraterrestrial life). And only certain poets are chosen by God, through the Cosmos, to comment upon it. You are one of those chosen few. Your poems verify your credentials and validate ny premises here.
Starward
I can't describe how deeply
I can't describe how deeply moved, humbled and transported I am by that incredible validation. Thank you. And, echoing forever, thank you . . .
What eloquent quiet, the years past:
certainty enshrined forever in the dark
spaces of our mind.
This, among other lines..shines. This is worthy of quoting.