PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Handicapped Freedom: . Well said. We are in a petrie dish and the nutrients are almost consumed. Cannibalism classes to begin anon. I like your usa short list, add world dictators and controllers of oil and gas. Apocalypse dreams of us, we dream of Nirvana's, heavens, and paradises. It's a great distraction from reality. If we could hit a reset button, what would we take out or not do again being wiser. Electronics, nuclear physics, ban math. Would we remain agrarian or would our baser instincts perpetuate themselves and make us once more climbers and over consumers set in high competition mode? We do not learn - weaker/wiser syndrome. Death is so final. The ultimate decision limiter. Cousin to time, death don't wait for zip. . We are hierarchal in nature and have to be on top, we have to be the leader, first, and admired by thousands (a writer's desire). Little gods syndrome is what we have here. And women just got into the game. By the time we reach the point of catharsis, that is when the ciitizens of the world look up and decide it's time for better thinking, better leaders, time to pick up torches and go after the monster, it will be too late in the day for rebellion. . Chain breaking is not a human quality because there are so many of them; television, careers, needlepoint, sports, family, estate planning, and friends. We are secure, or so we think until the volcano melts security,  or Fire and Water raid the forests, or the land slips and sucks down your country, or, or . . .  . Reset. Inevitably, yes. And yes, not in the time of you or me. The piper to be paid is immortal and waits for our offspring, hopefully not blocking the road riffin' Roy Orbison's IT'S OVER, when they get there. . I don't think Putin is stupid enoughTo choose the nuclear option, but if he did and his generals let him, for whatever reasons they've manufactured, the reset would be science-fiction apocalypse. Dystopia On the horizon. Civilization cabab on a stick. . Currently, prevention would require an incredible amount of cooperation and energy. Of course, we live in a world where two people cannot agree on the color in the flag overhead, so I'm not hopeful there. . We are on the verge of catastrophe and most of our chances and reprieves are used up.Oil and gas did us in because Putin made plans to dominate and terrorize and blackmail the west and got/is getting shut off.  It's in his genes, in his DNA, it is ego wanting absolute power. I never dreamed that big, the ideal is just too all consuming, to energy draining, a bit Mad Hatter. It's a big world. This is the same kind of ego that created gods and then subjected humans to them ruthlessly and indelibly. Belief is a terrible thing to trash. . The question generals are asking is: How do we get out of this mess? I think it is past time for blame laying. Everybody's guilty; We, the users and consumers and believers and followers--They,  the oligarchs, the leaders, the Ubers, the tech giants, the rapers of the earth. Mother nature will allow you a scratch or bruise,  but she will not allow you to dig too deeply. That hurts, and like the major powers of earth from time to time, she awakens, looks over at father nature and asked a few questions. Sleeping on the job? Forget to water the humans? "You are supposed to protect us," she says as she straps on her armor and her shield and tucks her helmet under her arm. Climate is under her control. We are foolish to attempt to usurp her attributes. . Whenever I hear a loud boom, I look up and go mushroom hunting. Have not done that since 9/11. I think of ants. Humans running around trying to find out why the ant hill has been stepped on. By the way, I liked your image of the mega yachts being squeezed through the gates of hell. That made me laugh. Thanks for the giggles. . ~A~

What a brilliant, quotable: What a brilliant, quotable reply! Thank you! 

Well, if I wasn't convinced: Well, if I wasn't convinced that you were born to write, understand and appreciate the craft of poetry, I certainly am now. I don't believe anyone has ever looked so far beyond my compositions into my process . . . and with such a luminous eye and a stratospheric gift for language no less.   I cherish every glimmer of encouragement that keeps me from abandoning my interest in writing, even when my schedule is crowded and too many concerns clutter my mind . . . you made all the difference. Thank you also for applying your encyclopedic knowledge of literature to your analysis.   The comparison of a fugue was so intricately beautiful and gratifying I just don't have words. I never stood back and looked at it that way. You made all the difference, as you did in your astonishing reverie on my strategy. How can I thank you?   You wrote that I claim the vastness "as a received gift and a venue", so now I humbly, yet with unspeakable elation, accept this superbly composed review as a precious gift. I almost want to frame it!     Forever grateful.   

All roads lead to Rome ('s collapse): Perhaps nuclear holocaust is the only thing that can save us from Plan A. Seems we've gone too far down the road of a small number of men trying to be god. The car doesn't have gas left to back out of it, now. (A little nod to your words, there.) Truly, of course I don't wish for it, but I also don't see the road we've been on up until now as being mentally and spiritually better than the road that a nuclear holocaust means for the physical body's well-being. We fear apocalypse, but there is no escaping ourselves. The world was designed that way, it seems. We must come face to face with all of our barren ways, one way or another.   Many peoples have been through apocalypses at the hands of others, including historically at the hand of our country. I, of course, know you understand this. Whether or not it is our specific faults, or you or I is more the victim than anything, we'll all be dragged before the band to face the music. And those that sing our swan song will, in turn, sentence their offspring to face it at some later date. Such is the nature of this loop that we confuse with an upcoming end. Even a nuclear holocaust would only put the game pieces back at the beginning of the game, and the "Adams and Eves" of yore would make their moves all over again. Perhaps they'll make better moves than the people who played the game before.   This reset - not to be confused with the "Great Reset" - will come, whether it's due to nuclear incideration (which, I'm doubtful of), or a much longer, drawn out, torturous collapse of civilization that comes after our technocratic overlords have manipulated the genome of us and many other creatures on the planet, as well as handicapping what it means to be a free-thinking and breathing human - way beyond the point of what you and I could recognize in our lifetimes. Thankfully, Dante left a lot of room in his Inferno for the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the tech gods like them in the various countries of power around the world, and the old money families with perhaps even deeper pockets, as well as their predecessors to come. That space is gonna be needed. Hopefully, the gates of Hades are wide enough to let those mega yatchs come on through.

This poem is so important,: This poem is so important, and so compelling, that I cannot resist placing a third comment.   Back in 1973, in freshman civics class, the semested project required of each student was a series of maps of one of three countries---Russia, and Germany, and a third I have forgotten---and each map had a particular focus:  historical sites, geographical terrain (like rivers and mountains), natural resources, major cities, major landmarks, etc.  The larger the country, the fewer of each item was required.  So I chose Russia, and though it was very vast, it fit well on my map paper, and the required items were easy to designate, once I learned the shape and outline of it.    I write this in order to proceed to a metaphor about Patriciajj's work.  Within her vocation to poetry, she is a cosmologist.  Within her cosmology, she is a cartographer of the cosmos.  She tells me where its landmarks---the metaphorical and the metaphysical---happen to be.  Like my ten maps of Russia, but far more sophisticatedly and elegantly, her poems follow the same contours---but present the varieties of landmarks, according to whatever specificity the particular poem presents.     In my freshman project, each map was required to have, in its lower right corner, a key---a box including one of those scales that shows the proportion of miles to inches, and also a list of what major symbols were used and what they represented.  The First Iris is the key to Patricia's cartography of the cosmos.  This poem acts as a key to her entire collection.  And the key to the key, and therefore to the entire body of her work, is the last four lines.  And, with aid of this key, we are better equipped to appreciate the gift that her poetry bestows on us---a cartographic image of the cosmos, with its most meaningful landmarks noted:  not the right ascention and declination of a nebula or a constellation, and not the best place from which to view the rings of Saturn; but something far more spiritual and therefore more profoundly vital to the existence we live in these earthbound bodies.       I believe that, like Stevens' poetry, Patricia's poetry will someday be taught academically, at the collegiate level, and that it will also be examined, interpreted, and debated by scholars and by student dissertations for degree.  And when some enterprising scholar writes the first textbook on her poems, the title is already given in this poem:  The Iris, The Stars, and The Universe.  

I will not apologize for: I apologize for making a second comment, but this poem certainly justifies it.    I will call The First Iris a Traffic Circle.  On the Northeast side of the city in which I live, there is a point where several major thoroughfares come very near to each other; and, in the middle of this nearness, the County built a traffic circle, a perfectly circular road, with an unusual amount of entrance/exit ramps, and these connect to each of the major thoroughfares, as well as several local roads lined with small shops and shopping outlets.  And, right in the middle of the Traffic Circle, on a large green lawn like an island in all that asphalt, was a wonderful Pancake House, to which my Father always took us on Easter Mornings, as well as other special days.    The First Iris is the Traffic Circle of Patricia's entire epic poem---even if that epic is, at yet, unfinished.  Both in its form, and in its subject matter, The First Iris gives us entrance ramps into the major thoroughfares that are her other poems, as well as entrance to various points in the poems at which we may "shop around" to savor the various verbal beauties that her poems provide.  In previous comments, I have referred to a reading strategy that was dependent upon Helen Vendler's analysis of Wallace Stevens' poetry.  I can now add the analogy of the Traffic Circle to that strategy---and my reading of Patricia's poems is now altered and improved, going forward, by The First Iris.  

Thank you so very much.: Thank you so very much.