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Love Like the first motion
of spring,
gasping
in the fatal cold
we grew heartbeat
by heartbeat,
and near your soul,
love found a place to fly
giddy
and sun-struck
from a ground paralyzed
as moonscape,
and lived.
And I follow it
like drugging smoke
that puts despair to sleep
and scrambles
the inner voice of care.
Born of dreams,
fed by desire,
it challenges things eternal,
things magical:
Proud skies
that burn to the earth
and dissolve
in the pure vastness
of oceans and sands,
stars that whisper
in black spaces
and connect infinity
fade before it.
Love outranks Creation,
confounds things sublime
whenever I hold you
and my arms are filled
with everything that
ever really mattered.
by Patricia Joan Jones
I just had to start my
I just had to start my morning's reading with this poem. This porm is like the highest peak of a great, huge mountain, in that it gives the reader a double perspective: the surrounding terrain becomes mire aooarent, and one is also lifted closer to the stars. I do not know if I have stated that in a way that makes sense, but that is how it feels to me.
Starward
I'm thrilled that you
I'm thrilled that you perceive everything I was seeking to accomplish. Few things are more satisfying than to be understood. My respect and deepest gratitude.
From the way you accomplish
From the way you accomplish those things, one could easily imagine that you invented the very concept and process of poetry.
Starward
Don't even know where to
Don't even know where to begin . . . boundless thanks. I had recently edited this and other poems because of formatting issues. Sometimes paragraph breaks don't take. I had to really fight to get those breaks in, and I wondered if I was just wasting my time, no one ever looks at these old poems anyway, but I was wrong, and I'm glad I fixed it.
You certainly made it worth my time. Endless gratitude. God bless.
No posting of YOUR words
No posting of YOUR words could ever be a waste of time. I often have trouble with the paragraph breaks, and it is frustrating. The quality of your poems is such that there is really no applicable deisgnation of "old" or "new." Not when the poems are viewed, as I view them, as parts of a vast cosmic epic. When I was studying Vergil, they told me that he worked on different parts of The Aeneid outside of chronological order, choosing whatever section he wanted to compose at any given time. So, there is really no old or new sections of that epic,---they are all contemporaneous. Your developing epic is the same. The consistent quality of the poems make them all coexistent in time, even though their posting dates suggest otherwise. And I am saying this very seriously: after all, someday, some happy grad student, writing a PhD dissertation on your poetry, may find some guidance in my comments.
Starward
Your observation on
Your observation on consistency gives me more comfort than you could ever know. So much gratitude, so little time to express it. . . but then, that might take a lifetime.
If a hundred poets spent a
If a hundred poets spent a hundred years typing on a hundred keyboards, even with a hundred terabytes of memory each, not one of them alone, and not any or all of them together, could reach the level of literary accomplishment that patriciajj brings to her poetry, and to this poem, and even to the comments she posts. And I am not saying this to get attention, to sound extravagant, or to curry favor. As long as postpoems lasts, these comments will be available and I will stand by them, now, and in the immediate or far future.
This poem has all the consistent hallmarks of a patriciajj poem, what I have called elsewhere (and with not much originality, but I am, after all, a minor poet) the PATRICIAN style, Those hallmarks are the colloquial, conversational tone; the epic cosmic reach to the stars; and the distinct sense that she is bringing us closer to, or initiating us into, the mysteries of the Cosmos. When I first began to read her poems, I was struck by the inter-poem consistency of these aspects. These are not aspects that achieve the poem achieves, but, far more basically, these are aspects of talent that achieve, rather than being achieved by, any poem she cares to construct. When I was a student, they told me that Wallace Stevens had thought to call his Collected Poems "The Planet On The Table." But Patriciajj goes beyond what Pop Stevens accomplished: she is not writing a planet on a table, but the Cosmos that surrounds us. She records, for our edification, the voice of the Cosmos in contemplation of itself to the glory of its Maker. And in this poem, which I realize is one of the centerpieces of her work (her poetic thought is sometimes so profound I have to look at least twice before I can catch up), she shows us what Dante called the Love that moves the stars---but she shows it moving the whole cosmos. And Love, as the Apostle Saint John has told us, is God.
Starward
Why are so many emotions easy
Why are so many emotions easy to articulate, but when it comes to the deepest gratitude I feel like someone crawling on her hands and knees searching for that needle of perfect expression?
You go above and beyond what any poet would desire in terms of being understood, knowing what a poem means to the reader, knowing that in some way it touched another . . . and if it was, even for a moment, even for one person, a lantern to see by, then, well, I can say I've reached a Nirvana for writers.
I still haven't found that elusive word to surpass gratitude, but until then I am indebted to you for this poem of poems, this masterfully written, treasured gift.
i love the imagery here:
"And I follow it
Like drugging smoke
That puts despair to sleep
And scrambles
The inner voice of care"
especially
"puts despair to sleep"
thanks for sharing
salam