SHARDS OF LIGHT
Chapter 1
The first of seven chapters is about remembrance, either actual, mystical, or humorous.
Sample poem from this chapter:
Kaleidoscope
At times, the poems closest to prose exhibit the finest fluency; “Kaleidoscope” is a case in point. The language flows easily, one sentence per verse, no syntactical puzzles, no obscurity. One verse: “My fragmentation negates / the way I used to be, and there’s / an unseen rift I cannot touch / behind these splinters of deceit.” It is just said, so simply, and justly so.
—Allen Cobb, composer, photographer, poet, installation artist, sculptor, inventor, essayist
Kaleidoscope
I’m a man of many shards
and, unless seen together in
all of its fractured wonder,
as incomplete as any.
One flick of the hand—I
turn into something new al-
together, leaving what’s
old and gone changed for good.
Numerous facets shift and still
resist fully falling into place,
except for this flaky, shattered
jumble of lights reaching out.
My fragmentation negates
the way I used to be, and there’s
an unseen rift I cannot touch
behind these splinters of deceit.
And yet my flickering purples,
yellows, and other clueless
colors impulsively glimmer every
time like stars, scattered and all.
Held against the sun or nearby
lamp, I quickly tend to appear
what I must have been before:
poised, light, and all in one piece.
Published in The Neovictorian/Cochlea, 2004,
SHARDS OF LIGHT
Chapter 1
02 Dark Velvet
03 Antarctica
05 The Stone Age and the Internet
06 Kaleidoscope
07 Black Hole
08 Arriving at Twin Peaks for a Bright Night View on San Francisco
09 Salivating Over a Still Life by French Painter Pierre Bonnard
10 Seeing a Map of Greece Across the Sky
11 Out of Darker Grace
13 Dark Night of a Soul
15 The Sun and I
16 An Alpine Panorama – The Creator’s Dream