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the threshold of wonder

photo-85at the tender nudge of a gentle wind, the flowers genuflect
and the well-tended rose garden holds me spellbound,
my rapt soul is brimming with its grace-filled movement,
with the vivid and heady mix of earthy and sublime

at night the garden is as incandescent as a saint’s prayer,
as sacred and nearly silent as the ruins of an ancient temple,
in the morning mist we tumble, me with this wealth of roses,
plummeting heart over head beyond the threshold of wonder

“When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming . . . In the experience of beauty, we awaken and surrender in the same act.”  John O’Donahue, The Invisible Embrace, Beauty: Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope

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©2015, poem and photographs, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

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No Time for Sleep

The future grows ever shorter while the book stacks grow high and disorderly alongside bed and chair. No time for sleep. The mind must use the hours to trawl the tomes and its faculties, feeding its hunger for the clarity and intimacy of fiction, the stark raving sanity of poetry. There are volumes of philosophy that flow like rivers as one book eases its way into the next. They reframe life and its perspectives. Occasionally I stop to listen to the music of my unread and untutored progenitors. They play their chalice-drums to ward off devils and tempt genii, but I face the ravages of the night by rustling pages. My survival is written in chapters, not notes. My sensibility is spun out of words.

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© 2013, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved, licensing for online publications is nonnegotiable and requires permission, attribution, link to this site, my copyright, no modification, noncommercial only and does not imply permission to include the work in the site’s printed collections or anthologies.
Photo courtesy of morgueFile