God of Poetry

(for James B. Nicola)

I have never reached 

for a book of poems

without reaching for 

my salvation.

I have

always suspected

the best poets

are lame goats

who could lead

us to the promise

land.

After all

 a single well-made

line is the bell

tied round the neck

of a God.

I must

follow it’s lead.

Dare we ask

how many journeys

we can sustain

without our instruments

trained on 

beauty?

At what price

are we making sense

of things?

We need a remedy 

for this unrest.

Perhaps each poem

is meant to

remind us of who

we were before

we misinterpreted Him

as missing

and left to find

Him again

for ourselves.

What if instead,

we turned on the radio?

“To be alive now

and on-line

is to feel

at once

incensed,

stultified by the onrush

of information,

helpless against

the rising tide 

of bad news

and worse opinions.

Nobody understands anything.

Not the global economy

governed by the unknowable

whims of algorithms,

not our increasingly

volatile and fragile

political systems,

not the implications

of the impending

climate catastrophe

that forms 

the backdrop

of it all.

Having created a world

that defies our

capacity to understand it…”

I turn back to my poem

for the sake of all

that is holy…

to see

the world cracked open

like an egg.

To find

myself the one 

emerging with wings.

Peter Valentyne

November 2018