For Ronette Evershed Stoddard, Spiritual Warrior:


your priesthood is shattered,
broken into shards of colored light, broken
as you stepped through the curtain of
refraction with which Death annoints its chosen ones.

your quivering beauty touched us all,
the beauty you lent to us
in that circle on those
secrets last nights, the
cashmere quality of your caring
carressing us in the flame-lit dusk
of our shared breath,
while you carried the heavy invitation
to Transfiguration deep in you.

you left this beauty behind you and
it grows, grows like the
accumulating seconds since your
departure grow into minutes, and
the minutes of your absence will grow
into hours and days and years that
we must spend hidden from your
perfect sight now.

just behind the air tonight,
you are watching and, if the seers
say true, that No Where
is really Now Here, then
you are now here with us,
available as breath and thought
dreams and love, all of those things
that reach through the fabric of time and
place, wanting so to to set us free.

Ronette, you dance on the point of my
pen as I write, smiling the deep-eyed
joy you owned into my soul.

your earthly shadow called home,
you are free to Shape Shift into the
geese overhead, tracking south on fall
winds, to fireflies mimicking God playing
hide and seek, or into me,
as I stretch my hand
to someone in need or
write a poem to the memory of
someone who could not
be contained in time for long.


-Cynthia Frasier Graves

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Meredith Jordan,