All Saints Day

All Saints Day Patricia Spears Jones (bio) Diamanda Galas screams sings rage upon love as winter forms drop by cooling drop. Summer past, perfect cool of morning walks through the park’s severe architecture. Earlier, spring in the Blue Ridge pastures and hill bejeweled with violets, dogwoods, the Judas Tree softens the bitter taste of recipes for worming, for worry, for the death of masters, overseers, the uniformed patriarchs of a history astonished by defeat, the burned mansions moth ridden grief, come back to haunt lanes to the left and right, that clear divide between the Black side and the white on All Saint’s Day, a wind resurrected as dervish spiking dry, sharp leaves righteous fuel for barnfires an honorable music to comfort the dead. Patricia Spears Jones Patricia Spears Jones is author of a play, Mother, and two volumes of poems, Mythologizing Always and The Weather That Kills. Her work has also been published in such periodicals as The American Voice, The Kenyon Review, The Black Scholar, Hanging Loose, and Journal of Southern Culture. She teaches a poetry seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. Footnotes © Patricia Spears Jones, January 1997 Copyright © 1996 Charles H. Rowell

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