7 Comments
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Sue Cauhape's avatar

This poem requires the reader to pronounce each word or phrase to allow it to penetrate the over-active mind. It calms the thought process and clears the pathway. Thank you.

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Sean Downing's avatar

Thank you! It is very much intended to be a meditation on the difference between the sacred and artifice.

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Charles M Pepiton's avatar

“absence makes room

for unexpected

voices.”

Thanks, Sean. There is much to sit with in this piece.

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Sean Downing's avatar

Well, you should come sit with it on my porch, brother.

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Charles M Pepiton's avatar

Would love to! And we might begin that sitting spell by collectively pondering the rich, implicit tension between "here / there are no rituals" and "moss softens the fallen column / where I rest / my knees". ;)

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Sean Downing's avatar

There's a lot of tension in faith...my faith anyway: life vs death, eternal beings inhabiting temporal bodies, heaven vs earth. But I don't know if the porch is the place for tension...

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Constance's avatar

Sue says what I felt and thought. Thank you for this moving poem, Sean. The pauses work so well with the content.

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