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Sketches of God
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Spiritual I have a friend who was
never born yet wrote every birth,
who knits fire from darkness
and has followed me to the
sequined Orion above
and to chasms without maps below.
All His steps were mine.
I knew Him well when His stars
lured me to the surface of night--
a long black sigh that cast those
floating myths.
Mistaken for magic or elements that
gambled and won a miracle, His steps
can be traced to quasars
and back to atoms
and to the uncharted mazes of minds,
and I've seen Him part oceans
each time spring arrived,
when the air was not the molten
fit of summer,
but laughter you could taste.
He flowed from an adoring sky
and patiently waited outside
my dreams--all those high priests
that bless my desires.
Then in winter when the begging
trees clawed at a locked sky
He brought back spring--
instant gold disguised as faith.
Romping through His simplicity,
I uncovered the Ages--
a universe in every cell,
but crouched in cocoons I
learned the most;
in darkness I interpreted light,
often exchanging it for skin,
and it was in some unnamed tomb
where I finally saw the sky.
I named Him Love,
He named me Always.
by Patricia Joan Jones
The great science fiction
The great science fiction writer, Philip K Dick, once wrote that he was not a novelist, but a fictionalizing philosopher. And, if I might adjust his phrase a bit, I can say---entering this poem into the evidence---that you are a cosmologizing and theologizing poet. Your authority and credibility just continue to extend beyond and tower above all my other literary reading. This poem, which I came to through someone else's comments, is beyond brilliant; beyond skilled; beyond exquisite. This poem vibrates with poetic life, as, I believe, the greatest of ancient cosmologial poems vibrated and resonated, until we grew jaded in their presence. At the moment---and this may change depending on your future posts---I would choose, were I a grad student, this poem, the Orion poem, and the Council of Stars poem as the foundation for an analysis of your Cosmology. Now, of course, some future post of yours, or tomorrow's, may change the combination for me. And, unlike those future students, I am free to recombine my favorites within your oeuvre. I have never seen any living Poet whose work most closely exemplifies what Eliot said about a new poem reconfiguring the combination of all the poems that come before; although, in this case, I realize that this poem has been post for a while, but it is brand new to me, and therefore it reconfigures my sense of the combinations within your collection. I am rambling on, but how can I not, in the face of this magnificent symphony of words, with the organ's oceanic throb and the celesta's delicate chiming. It's a poem, it's music, it's a cosmology, it's a credal theology, it's a poem, it's MAGNIFICENT. Like an organ, if I may extend an unoriginal metaphor, it has several banks of keys that, with various stops opened or closed, it plays an entire array of metaphoric sounds, all in praise of God, and God's Cosmos as revealed to a BRILLIANT POET. Unlike Dante, whom I fervently admire, you have not needed 33,000 lines to construct your cosmological vision. You have done it in a much shorter, and therefore much more effective, format. And though this may seem like a drooping candle filickering in the sunlight of high noon, I offer my sincere Bravo and thank you ever so much for posting this when you did.
Starward
I can't thank you enough for
I can't thank you enough for taking the time to read, in depth, with such appreciation and understanding, and leaving such a brilliant perspective on my work. God bless you, fellow voyager in the light.
"...the surface of night"
Lovely imagery throughout. A song of faith. ~S~
Thank you for your kind
Thank you for your kind comment.
your pen is a lightning rod
poised on infinity