Don Gray
Art Essays, Art Criticism & Poems
Seekers of the Stars...A PoemSome few emerge from the sacred flame, move beyond groping cave grunters to arch their necks in nightward gaze at the chance-strewn glitter high above. What are they, these stars, to near apes? How do hairy hearts and icy stars combine to sing the siren song of primeval divinity, the first faint stirring of some thing beyond belly-hunger, throat-thirst, the lust of hunt and war, the flame in the gonads? Through cool desert dark, timeless tread purple silhouettes humped foot to padded foot with warm-sand, blue-shadow brethren, etched by the diamond-brilliant, star-drilled Arabian night. Steaming dung and ruptured sand mark their way...herdsman, camel driver, lover, poet, astronomer... impaled by the stars' unrelenting daggers of eon-thrusting light withdrawn again through each star source to pierce the utter core of eternity and the fiery heart of God. Before the temple built on holy mount, before the voice of gods in sacred groves, before philosophy, philosophy... there was the sea, the stars and silent Greeks to pattern random particles of light after robust constructions of myth, the sun and shadow of the Aegean soul. Perseus eternally saves sweet Andromeda from the leviathan beneath the waves; vast Hercules thwarts the timeless advance of monstrous Draco; the great square of Pegasus forever soars through velvet fields of night. I think the stars shone brighter then when blood still coursed through veins of ancient Arab, ape and Greek. Copyright by Don Gray
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