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Speechless: No words, other than wow.

Thank you very much for this: Thank you very much for this excellent comment, because this was my first real attempt in this kind of form.  I really feel much better about it now, having read your comment. On the internet, there is a photograph of Metropolitan Benjamin, Archbishop of Petrograd, standing alone in front of a so-called "people's court" which sentenced him to be executed as a counter-revolutionary, because he would not release to the Bolsheviks the Cathedral's Communion utensils (which apparently were pure gold) as contributions to a fund-raiser for the Bolsheviks' governing expenses.  When he was executed, he was dressed in rags rather than in his monastic garb or the liturgical robes, as the Bolsheviks felt that knowledge of his true identity, as one of the chief bishops of the Russian Orthdox Church, might cause the firing squad to either refuse to shoot him or even try to extricate him from the situation.  He, and several others with him, were transported to the edge of a railroad complex, a team of sharpshooters were trucked in, and the bodies were tossed away somewhere and have not yet been found.   Thanks again for the comment.

Reminiscent of the steadfast: Reminiscent of the steadfast Job in the Bible, the Bishop in your nightmarish, spellbinding and inspiring victory of the soul remained the paragon of faithfulness.   As with all your expertly scripted, fast-paced tales, I couldn't look away and could hardly breathe. Such is the power of a great narrator!   Here, your potent blend of historical facts, intriguing fantasy and tight-woven drama was addictive. There were also instructive stories expressed between the lines, making this a spiritually enriching and captivating journey.   Excellent work!

I'm forever amazed by your: I'm forever amazed by your unlimited supply and variety of ideas.   In this riveting study of a classic work, scaled down and condensed to highlight the emotional motives behind the tragedy, you stun and delight with the same impact of the author.   Remarkable power-weaving of words.

I have been reading Poetry: I have been reading Poetry for fifty years as of this past April.  I have been privileged to spend time with some of the greatest combinations of words by the greatest combiners:  Vergil, John Milton, Wallace Stevens. T. S. Eliot; and, since early 2020, Patriciajj.  I have said, repeatedly, that the posting of one of Patricia's poems is an event; the way the appearance of a new star on the face of the sky is an event.     In the decades I have been reading, I have developed an appreciation for poems that depict a process; like when Vergil describes the making of Aeneas' shield, designed by Vulcan and forged in the Cyclopean furnaces; or, to cite a modern example, the way the Universe slowly disintigrates in Wallace Stevens' poem, "Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion."     This poem that Patricia has just posted is a process poem, and the process it depicts is not just a key to its own meaning, but an example of how her entire collection works.  She begins by showing us two of the primary functions of Poetry as it has come to be understood in the West:  the application of metaphor and simile (in this poem, she begins with siimiles) to show us the unity of existence; and the refurbishing of dismantled memories---so that the memories refurbished by the Poet become what she calls, and what is, a life changing knowledge that proceeds to its ultimate purpose---the declaration of Love.  I will cite just one precedent for this, although I suppose that examples abound:  Eliot's words, in the first section of The Waste Land, tell us that the mix of memory and desire stirs dull roots with spring rain.  This happens even in what Eliot, in that poem, calls the Dead Land; and in what, near the end of this poem, Patricia characterizes as a vast cathedral, crumbling or glorious---depending on one's perspective  This is a paradox---another process which Poetry reveals to us, because we are creatures of both paradox and contradiction:  we praise the day's bright sunlight and then cover our eyes and squint, and we scare ourselves with ghost stories at night, and then, when we can't sleep, we stay up and begin to recognize constellations.  Even the most important event in History seems, to us, to be a paradox:  the brutally battered and mutilated body of a carpenter, nailed by spikes of Roman iron to two beams of local wood, is also the God Who not only designed and constructed the entire Cosmos, but was also revealed to us as Love---Love (not hatred, not self-righteousness, not conformity) as the God of Life and Salvation.       Ordinary prose, which, for so many of us, passes for attempted poetry when it is stacked (like piles of manure) in vertical arrays, cannot delineate the paradox:  the wishful thinking of the wannabe is never fulfilled in the achieved art of the real Poet, when that Poet has been revealed among us.  Then that Poet begins to tell us what the processes of this existence our, and what are the paradoxes inherent in those processes:  whether that Poet is living on a farm in Mantua and describes ordinary shepherds hering their sheep and falling in love; or a lawyerly insurance executive, between meetings or conferences, sitting at his desk and contemplating the paradoxical relationship between the imagination and reality.        I have tried, during the last three years, to offer interpretations on Patricia's poems as they appear; so that, when I look back, I think I have put together several suggestions of how to interpret her work, and how her poetic artistry and skill actually operate.  But I also believe that, someday, there will be a much larger proliferation of commentary on her poems.  I still believe that what we are privileged to watch, here at PostPoems, is the steady accumulation of one of the greatest poetic structures of our time.  Sure, someone will doubt this assertion; will dismiss it as too expansive; and I will point to those same persons certain published essays, from the roaring twenties, that dismissed The Waste Land as tripe, and declared that Wallace Stevens' poems were merely verbal stunts written for their shock value.  But who now really remembers those essays except as laughing stocks in the shadow of the verbal grandeur that those two Poets created simultaneously in one of the most verbally elegant periods of time in human history.         During my undergrad years, the courses in literature that I attended operated from a sort of united purpose:  not to establish a single reading of whatever poem, or novel, or tale we were reading, but to place that item within the context of a literary canon.  This was one of the influences that Old Possum, the great Eliot, brought to Literature:  that it did not happen as individual outbursts with blinkers on, but occurred as part of a Canon---so that one may trace a lineage (or, if you like, a literary DNA) from Vergil, to Dante, to Eliot and Stevens, and to Patriciajj.  While we readers (especially those who are scholars) do this, the Poet's perform a similar tracing:  they trace the processes that are the basic functions of the Universe as Christ, Who is Love, designed it.      They tell me that Einstein, in his theoretical researches, determined that the Cosmos consisted of four basic forces or processes, and that he proposed (although he never discovered) a mathematical statement that would account for those processes simultaneously.  This, on the poetic level, is what Vergil did---and the forces he located were shepherding, farming, and the destruction and construction of cities.  This, on that same poetic level, is what Patricia's Poetry does; in each of her poems (sometimes it is centrally displayed, sometimes more subtle in its presentation; but always utterly and ecactly consistent), and, with great awe and admiration, we see that same demonstration in this triumphant poem.

thank you for your kind: thank you for your kind comment.