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May Perpetual Light Shine

Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms

Perfect in their drench and wreck

Each of us bears an ornament of grief

A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar

It is how humans know their kind—

What is known as love, what can become

the heart’s food stored away for some future

Famine

Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded

Shared fragments of earth & air drift & despair.

We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:

musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha

cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling

colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness

as those we love begin to delight

in the stars embracing

Patricia Spears Jones, a longtime resident of New York City, is the author of A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015).

About Patricia Spears Jones

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem was started on my birthday as I was thinking about my mother who died in 2013—that she may really be happier in heaven. The title is from a Christian prayer for the dead. The afterlife is contemplated in a range of beliefs, and for me the idea of returning to the celestial is very powerful.”

—Patricia Spears Jones

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SELF PORTRAIT as retratos de cosas locas y de locos (stolen)

^{for Papo Colo}

Shall we have cocktails while slipping about the
Edge of Catastrophe—gin and tonic for summer
Whiskey sour for fall. All is not well, yet sun
Illumines green leafed trees, soon bare soon bare

Patricia Spears Jones

2021

Autumn, New York, 1999

And I am full of worry I wrote to a friend
Worry, she replied about what—love, money, health?

All of them, I wrote back. It’s autumn, the air is clear
and you hear death music—the rattle of leaves swirling

the midnight cat howling, a newborn baby’s 3 am
call for food or help or heart’s love

At the market, the green, red and yellow apples are piled high,
sweet perfume—once, I went apple picking in Massachusetts

a day of thralling beauty, my companions and I
had no desire to leave the valley—the plump trees,

Patricia Spears Jones

2016

Seraphim

Once a beauty, full figured, beloved
And then a fever, sweats, water vomited
Until the body gave out. And then,

Wings and lyres and legion of other
Angels. Singing, dancing, flying about

But once a beauty remembers
Physical love and then its loss

Patricia Spears Jones

2023

Poems

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May Perpetual Light Shine

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