While You Are Not Obligated

By

Radiance Angelina Petro

(Using my own words as well as words

found in The Dictionary of Shipping Terms and Phrases,

by Edward F. Stevens, pub. 1947)

You are sufficient, seaworthy,

you have tendered time

its disbursements of grief,

your tears have perfected your sight

enough, you have recouped

the solvency of the spirit,

your manifest includes hope’s readiness.

Now, against all risk, enter outward,

for there is yet the safety of adventure,

and you now sail unenclosed waters.

Mooring ropes, as you know,

wear thin, and there are ships

drifting at sea, others are icebound,

nearly inaccessible, waiting

for the frost-feathered gull

to drop the notice of abandonment.

There are plenty of lighthouses along the shore.

What is needed are lightships willing

to take the lost alongside, to pass provisions,

to touch and stay, and lead them

to believe out of the starless night,

and into the harbor of taverns and song,

where they can, unladdened and free

of encumbrances, reinterpret themselves

back into the land of the living.

From Here On In

A Collage Poem

By

Jennifer Angelina Petro

(Using my own words and phrases,

as well as some found in, “The Golden Ass,”

by Apuleius, trans. By Jack Lindsay, 1962)

I want to know everything

in the world.  Beyond

the narrow cast of reason,

that is where I am going.

I consider nothing impossible.

The hinges snapped

from my mind’s shutters,

and I am thirsty for every sip

of novelty.  I want festivals

of the flesh—the rare

and the marvelous.

If you want to go with me,

I ask you do not think,

to carry no convictions—

be like a newborn sun—wings

outspread, conceived by sea

and foam, fragrant as cinnamon.

Unwind your wants and desires,

listen to the rivers muttering magic

begun again anew in full brilliancy, as scars

of old wounds heal as you spirit

through leaves and fields, leaping, like

a goat high in the mountains.

Dionysus will be our guide.

This abandonment is the touchstone

of warm snuggery, of a luxuriance

of kisses, of bandying jests,

of uncrimping the soul, of a kind

of wild freedom that resounds

bliss through your every bone.

Everything you see

from here on in

is you.

When We Delight

A Collage Poem

By

Jennifer Angelina Petro

(Using words and phrases found in the book, The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri, published, 1923, along with my own words and phrases.)

Things overlap as memories

carrying one another

to other revelations

of ourselves.

Remember:

a triangle is moving towards us—

a passageway into rooms where we see beyond

the usual, where forms reorganize themselves

in infinite simplicity.

There are echoes everywhere

of the song within us—

marvel at it—joyous and clear—

the sense of all contained.

Into these rooms we carry what we know.

But we are not here to do what has already been done.

There are still more pages possible.

Even though our souls ring cracked—

we must tell of our trip around beauty,

we must tell of our wonderful drifting in and out

of the crowds, where dancers appear

perhaps as surprised to see us

as we are of them.

There is value in such revelations—

of being sketch-hunters of the least parts.

There are openings everywhere

when we delight in the constant hatchings.

We are moments of sky.

Nothing exists for itself.