Heavenly Peace

A Gloss on the following lines:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
aaaaaaaaaShutting, with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
aaaaaaaaaEnshaded in forgetfulness divine….”
—“TO SLEEP” by John Keats)

O soft embalmer of the still midnight
How peacefully we lie beneath your white
And gentle hands. You work your magic now,
We know, with soothing whispers and endow
With strength to take the approaching day’s delight
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.

Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
The eyes too full of beauty to decline
Your old companion, the maker of pleasant dreams
Who shows each thing much better than it seems
By glaring day. Soft hands, almost divine
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light.
Within a luscious garden of delight
We find ourselves enfolded in a pure
Fragrance of musky rose, a nightly cure
For heartaches we endure to stand upright.
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine,
Float inward. There our spirits find
A citadel secure from every foe
And we are made a part of the heavenly flow
That gently runs inside the heart sublime
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

Personal Aesthetic

We each portray, in colors of the soul,
A crafted artifice of what we feel,
And thus in patterned portraiture we steal
Some structured sense from the chaotic whole.
Some in shades of brown and beige extol
The strengths of earthly life while others feel
The psychedelic pinks and reds reveal
Their essence best and thus their lives control.
Whatever choice of hues, each person’s art
Can never truly penetrate entire
The mirrored complications of the heart,
So full it is of both the ice and fire;
Yet each to each is driven to impart
A form from within himself we all desire.

Holocaust.

(In Terza Rima)

The ash from chimneys floats down
And paints our shoulders a darkish gray
When everything else is a dusty brown.

And we remember that on a certain day
When we were led into this wretched place
That we would have to eventually pay

The ultimate price to the master race.
They would take us to a communal hall
There we for the last time would embrace.

And as the Zyklon-B formed the gas
Our brains would try to finally face
Our merciful God and be free at last

Good God

(A Double Gloss)

(Based upon the following lines from
“Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cuillen
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die….)

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And , led by His Holy Spirit, we will find
Blessed happiness, a core of peace,
And in the middle of our strife release
From struggle and a joyful, peaceful mind—
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind.

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The worm must come before the butterfly
Or human hearts, when softening, must break
And flood the eyes. But then how could he take
Notice of all the little hurts we cry
Unless He stoops to quibble and tell why?

The little buried mole continues blind
With little cares of what he leaves behind
Because within his world there are none who see
Or strive to rise out of the earth. But we
Still question Nature that would forever bind
The little buried mole to continue blind.

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Invade the realm of mole, in earth to lie
While all above us continues as before,
Not knowing, until then, that death’s a door?
But then we understand God’s reason why,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die.

***

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who has taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has over two hundred and fifty publishing credits including publication in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS.  He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda.  He has two daughters and four grandchildren.