The Reader Engages with the Text
What luck when the pilot
reports finding a shortcut
so that a flight across the continent
will take us under five hours.
Have we found a fold
in time and space? Perhaps.
The universe so playful
in all it offers, the gifts
it gives. Signs
and symbols in the clouds
when we burst through--
baroque and blooming,
all white light and in
designs we find
when we try to read
the world we see.
Worth wondering
what language will serve
it best--whether words
or shapes, notes
or numbers. And what
beliefs to stamp them with--
even of author. Whether
to call it God. And what each
faith brings to attribution.
Outside the window, beauty
distracts us from final answers--
rose coloring all with its
eternal light. Sacred moments
before darkness seeps in
like peace, wrapping us
in time even as we stand
outside its watch.
We’re uncertain of the space
we’re in, of loops or overlaps,
synchronicity or the divine,
and free to contemplate
questions that blossom
like the clouds our craft
will navigate--of moment
and meaning, of states of grace.
Might we find, as in the Hindu
mind, that these human shapes
we take, archetypes of mind
and matter, might be
the language of the soul?
In motion across these dimensions,
might we speak
so we become what we will be?
Dana Holley Maloney teaches English at Montclair State University. For a long time, she worked with high school students, as a teacher of English and Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in Lips, North Dakota Quarterly, English Journal, and Journal of New Jersey Poets and are forthcoming in Paterson Literary Review and Pine Hills Review. At Duke University, she received the Anne Flexner Award for Poetry. When not in New Jersey, she lives in Freeport, Maine. When not writing, she is likely gardening.
Amethyst Review 