PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

On the last night of my: On the last night of my hospitalization, and anticipating tomorrow's return home, I am very glad to have read, and now to comment upon, this poem. I am not going to write my usual comment, but I am going to be very personal, because I think this poem deserves that kind of response.  In other words, rather than discuss how the poem works,  I am going to disclose a more difficult aspect---how it works on me as a reader. First, this was gut-wrenching for me to read, because I wish I had articulated to Etienne, in college, what ypu have written here.  Etienne and I could have shared what you have so brilliantly described as the green sizzle of a world in love / with light and just being.  (BTW, these lines are the poem's gravitational center.) Like the great Poets who are your peers, you take emotions that are inexpressible for most of us, and attach to them certain images that function as bearers of those emotions.  "These fragments I have shored against my ruin," T. S. Eliot wrote in the final section of The Waste Land, and you have shored up the emotional ruin that I experienced after failing to respond to Etienne's love, and that has haunted me since 1977---and most especially since his passing, several years ago.   As the Poem concludes we have several aspects of one process---the spritz of light among pines, a sound like wind or words, and the pouring of sand to fill the world.  I remember from my childhood watching dawn light come through the pine tree farm that was adjacent to our back yard, and that was always a comforting sight, despite, if on a school day, what kind of bullying (for being different) might be in store for me.  The sound of wind---which, in Scripture represents Holy Ispiration---and the sound of words (another speaks to me, so I am not entirely alone, despite being made to feel totally alone and isolated by my shabby treatment of Etienne.  And finally, sand---as ballast, to balance the world, which may---when these emotions that the Poem names comes among us to make us teeter off balance when the emotional resonance is a little too much to handle, as it may be from time to time while we are alive in this flesh.  However, the sand pouring into the world is also the sand in an hour glass, bringing nearer that hour when we shall be released from these deteriorating bodies and can soar, as released spirits, into the Kingdom of Love, where the person you address in the Poem, and Etienne, will be waiting to greet us, and to give us those words of absolution in that dominion of unrestrained Grace.   You have placed many marvelous comments on my poems, and my Ad Astra series exists because of your encouragement.  But, with this poem, you have shown me a side of yourself, and a side of myself, that exist apart from our sitewide personas as Poets (you, major; me, as minor as the day is long):  rather, in this poem, you and I, and you and anyone else who has shared these feelings of regret (sometimes, as in my case, a desperate, almost choking, feeling of regret) meet, not as Poets, or as Poet and reader, but as raw souls carrying burdens that we just cannot put down.  And in this way, your Poem enters the Canon of Literature as an equal to the poems of three other Poets:  Eliot, Cavafy, and Vergil.  Each of them has given us a poetic description of what it is to be a raw soul.  And your poem is, in the final analysis, hidhly uplifting as ir presents, in its conclusion, the processes that function as balm upon the rawness.  The entire poem is one of the most emotionally searing poems that I have ever read; but, like Dante's Comedy, the balm is offered after the sear has been endured. Thank you for posting this poem; for ministering to my soul; and for giving me a way to articulate my horrible failure toward Etienne, and the hope and promise of his forgiveness---which, in the timelessness of the Kingdom of Love, already exists. _________________________________________________ PS.  I am always a day late and a dollar short, and I have a bad habit of not including important details in some of the comments I make, so I want to amend this one now.  I mentioned, above, Vergil, Cavafy, and Eliot; bur I forgot to mention Pop Stevens, which was stupid on my part because your Poetry as a whole joins his in the cosmic or long perspective; but also, this poem reminds me of two of his "healing" poems---"The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain" and "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour."  In both of these poems, he set aside, for a moment, the cosmic grandeur of his other stuff and spoke about the soul's rawness, and its need for a Poem as high and sturdy as a mountain, and a Poem that would articulate that final soliloquy.  This is what you have done with this poem.  You have put youe cosmic grandeur on hold for a moment, while ministering in a very personal way to those of us who, like you, have this burden of disappointment.  You have helped me here, even more than Stevens has helped me, because you have spoken directly, in this poem, to my sorrow about Etienne, and have shown me how it can become joy.