A Sky God and Skylark doing their sky-love thing. (original graphic)
When the Virginia Tech shooting went down five years ago almost right away the Quotable Poet came out with the poem “All Night in Savannah the Wind Wrote Poetry”. It seemed reasonable to expect he might do something like that after the Dark Knight Rising movie massacre in Colorado but that didn’t happen. It could be because of the major push on his Guerrilla Decontextualization series or the return of his Bright Skylark Literary Productions website… more on both of those later.
Whatever the behind-the-scenes situation is the interesting thing that did happen was when the attorney/author and Huffing Post columnist John W. Whitehead posted his piece on the shootings: Violence Begets Violence Making Sense of the Dark Knight Massacre . Right at the outset he quotes QP Aberjhani’s poem “Angel of Mercy”, so I almost made that the August poem of the month. So why didn’t I? Because more than 500 people signed up on Goodreads to win a copy of his Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black and it seems more apropos to spotlight a poem from those pages. This one is called “How the Sky God Confessed Love for the Skylark”:
HOW THE SKY GOD CONFESSED LOVE FOR THE SKYLARK
You are neither a phoenix hatched out of paradise
nor an eagle carved from golden distinction.
Your stature poses oddly between crow-sized and
hawk-like, denying the genus to which you belong.
And poets gazing upon you do not frost their tongues with praise.
Your color is irresistible for reasons that are unholy.
Your eyes cast nets that liberate the imprisoned.
Where you command power is from the chair of your song;
your trill annihilates and recreates my heart at will.
Symphonies spill from your wings like genesis
pouring down in torrents from the lips of the sun.
If I am a god of some notable stature, it is only
because your soul has given birth to my love,
your wings revealed to my breath its purpose for being.
poem by Aberjhani, from Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
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