PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Me, I see an ominous night with dark tendrils reaching down from the sky, while hope floats away from the observer like gossamer on a wild torrent of wind – as an all-encompassing powerful storm moves in. It is coming to sweep everything away. The cast-iron despair – is the end of all things. While the counterfeit joy is a sober peace – in letting go of the entire mirage of hope… embracing the soundless opera of an icy symphonic tomb – only to be absorbed as a tiny spectacle of dust by God and the Cosmos – which is in fact, everlasting – and full of possibility.

As this poem begins, one reading it for the first time will be inclined to think it is a dismal poem.  The poem begins with a silenced Earth, certainly from a cataclysmic event (although the Poet does not define that event); then she brings in a grayness, a dismal condition so gray the wind becomes a part of the stone.  She tells us that river mists become like dreams of Vesuvius---perhaps one of the most effective metaphors of cataclysm in human history.  Mention of Vesuvius, like mentioning, say, the Titanic, is a metonomy of disaster and cataclysm.  Then she uses a word I consider bone-chilling in the context of this poem . . . "iron-clad."  But then, within the iron-clad condition, she detects a gleaming of hope.  But she does not reject the iron-clad situation, although she describes it further as a soundless opera, a symphonic tomb, and a sacrament of ice (in these concepts, her perspective leans---I think---toward that of Wallace Stevens, especially in his poem, "The Snow Man").  But she finds in these parts the presence of God, and she recognizes that these are also parts of the Cosmos.  The Cosmos contains things we often do not want to consider:  rogue asteroids that can wipe out millions of dinosaurs; neutonr stars that can devour even light, and crush everything in their grasp to something less than the particles within an atom.  These are also parts of the Cosmos, and they correspond to those symphonic tombs.

   But, in being able to recognize the existence of these things, we demonstrate our sentience.  A houseplant knows neither neutron stars nor rogue asteroids, and doesn't care because it doesn't know that it doesn't know.  It is in our cognizance of depair, even when seeming iron-clad, that we can find gleamings of hope and joy:  this is a spiritual sentience that, I personally believe, is alone in the created Cosmos.  But it is an awareness, and also can be an appreciation, of sentient existence.  And that is part of the vocation that I have suggested, elsewhere, with which we have been tasked by the Creator:  to explain the Cosmos to itself.  In this poem, as in all of her Cosmis poems, Patricia does this; and by allowing us to hear her explanations, she makes us better than we have been.