Jeremy Michael Clark’s poem ‘One Fire, Quenched with Another’

 Jeremy Michael Clark’s poem ‘One Fire, Quenched with Another’

I request readers to read the poem first from the above link and then my review. Thanks.

The poet himself has given as the core content of the poem in the following lines:

“This poem tries to articulate the pain of finally finding what one has been looking for, and how it can’t salve the pain of having been without it.”

The poem reflects the hard work in carving the poem for the traverse of the reader to a world which is exclusive of 'our world' and which may change the poet and get changed by him too. Generation after generation the humanity have been complacent about the patterned race for power, money and material wealth and comfort. A creative mind wonders why there is so much zeal in bringing out duplicates of the age old efforts and quests. The path untraveled and unexplored only can be something forward. The following stanzas picture how why and where the humanity is stranded:

13. He lost control of the reins

& the horses did what one expects

from animals whose lives had always been

tightly squeezed between two fists:

14.breaking from the path they’d always known,

15.they galloped nearer to that world from which they’d been kept,

16.not out of malice but a kind of mercy

17.for the world the father feared the horses would destroy.

The will and determination and courage and the passion to break loose and redefine the direction of human life is a rare gift. Few creative minds and rebels only deviate and dare to go all alone into unknown lands. But the destination is never an addition to the materialistic accomplishments, failing to understand which may only create a vacuum worse than the scores of closed mindsets’ chain. Visualization of the abstract and dramatization of the complex thought processes within are strengths of a poetic mind. This poem radiates the immense drive of the poet to break loose.