The sky was a humming and frosty blue;
at sunset, against the veined and naked
branches of a sycamore, a bulging half-moon –
of jasmine white – insisted; higher than high
a jet-plane had left a straggling, pink-orange line
and passed, without a sound, towards elsewhere;
I had thought, all day, of the Holy Ghost,
if, perhaps, the he or she of it could be inveigled
to offer to the opened heart some rare and grounded
poetry of being, to hold in place that numinous
and sometimes ruinous sense of need we feel
for warmth and certainty, for telling words
to live on a white page in lines that would lighten
the dark, with receptivity, wisdom, love.
John F. Deane
Illustration Nick Victor