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The Poet’s Heart
by Richard Jones

 

*

Think of the buddhist monks
who sat in the road
at the start of the war,
saffron robes soaked in gasoline,
and set themselves on fire.

Think of the violence,
the immolation, the composed desire
for peace
silently spoken to ashes;
think of the gift,
the eloquence of their burning.

Poems, too, burn
like a body on fire,
devoted, implacable,
not in flashing epiphany,
but steadily, like the priests
and the world they could imagine.

Think, too, of Shelley’s drowned body
burning on the beach in Italy,
of Trelawny, who reached
into the fire
to steal the poet’s heart.
The poet’s heart:
what the fire could not consume.

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From AT LAST WE ENTER PARADISE, by Richard Jones

Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press