The Quickening Poem by John Dowdall

The thunder clap and rolls of lightening the light's source are energies unknown, the Radison Hotel and the car lot lit and Jack walks into the large marquee.

Sweet Eurydice rises again the music falls from the fiddle and bow the word painter claps his hands and Procne dances without Philomena in the moment to honor eternal love.

Nothing is real, there are no defined spaces or a descent into morning. Just the truth of the essential energy, the thrill of the quickening, the ecstatic moment that will live on in you.

All the dancers merge from across the ages and the quadrilles meet the bonfire dancers as the Chamber 4 plays to counter the horns of the Jazz 3 with an ancient hunt warden.

All of this energy provides us with music for solace on all our days under the falsehood of the pulsar clock. Staring eyes and barked orders and misty-eyed, near-hungry on hostile streets.

Cool Sunny day. Moving to the several tunes still playing on from the night before. Jack's invisible longbow -drawn to pierce the seams in the air- to split the dimensions warped at the hanging tree aloft.

Jack has come of age, he knows that he cannot see with eyes beyond this facade of gas and clay, and orientate his way without a trick compass based on static magnetic north.

All here is still and rotates. The breeze blows softly. Moving animals. Human fragments reside underneath the grass. The mild sun shines from behind a silver water-laden cloud.

We humans are confused. Impetuously, we want energy explained to our hearts and minds. Earth and infinity, a creation of, sustained by, sub-particle flows? Our minds die and all familiar flows fade away.

After that? Nothing? Or do we have our senses? Next a flat plain seen or unseen but felt underfoot depending on how we are called? Then a sudden sound and scents and a glimpse of -as a mind's limits dissolve.