POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #3, Series C
NOTHING
So is this magic place to die with us?
I mean that world where memory still holds
the breath of your early life:
the white shadow of first love,
the voice that rose and fell
with your own heart
the hand you’d dreamed of closing in your own . . .
all those beloved burning things
that dawned on us,
lit up the inner sky?
Is this the whole world to vanish when we die,
this life that we made new in our own fashion?
Have the crucibles and anvils of the soul
been working for the dust and the wind?
Remember this is a translation from the Spanish, so the English can only interpret. A new sonnet form? One extended theme. A bleak one at that, or does it suggest that it is enough to have the joy of love—“the white shadow of first love” and “all those beloved burning things" —when we are living, no matter what happens afterwards!
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.