This is what is wife had to say about the following
poems...
The first one expresses something about the enormous
drive behind his work. They all tell something about his "inner workings." He
wrote scads of wonderful poetry while giving finals -many of them
musings over the wisdom and knowlege imparted over the past semester.
All of them show his flair with words. One of them, "December Day" is
included here. The others were in pencil and written at other times.
I would assume the last one was probably written while he was waiting
on me when I was either practicing or playing a service at a church.
His mind was always in gear.
The work, the press, since to meet the task
Of unrelenting tenseness, to do the job
Acquiting oneself as fair as I can
To go beyond the interim motions
To recall in the demands of truth,
And taking strides of widest span
Overcoming dross of grose tedium,
I respond with fierce determination
To make this life count.
Joe Chris Robertson
Light filters meaning, illiuminating nuance,
Sight seen, mind known, trustworthy fact,
We don't doubt about it-- we verify
The ties and ignore the sighs of reality.
Feelings impose--less concrete than those
Viewed and voided--we deny data
Responding timidly to the turning screw
Of focus narrowing the lens of knowledge.
Joe Chris Robertson
A gray day sky, December laden
With the weight of wetness due to fall,
Frozen grains or fluff, white stuff anyway
To blanket and slicken, and strangely remake
Realities we take given and borne away.
When life crys for a voice to speak
The founding joys and considerable chaos
That enfolds and frames our being,
We grasp for illusions that befit the best
And store in philosophy the rest.
We have no way of knowing what we don't know.
The unfathomed world apart from our ken
Causes us to spend every waking moment
Breaking over patterns, systems, logic,
Pedagogic perambulations, fanciful flights all over
To uncover, discover, the omnipotent unknown.
Joe Chris Robertson (Art 402, 12-16-87)
Retreat Into the Inner Nucleii I
What comes is what emerges - sight is not so sure
Of the core of self hoodness expressed inter alia,
We fail to feel perimeters bordering the shell
To be pricked tentatively, but a tenacious grasp held
To striations my cellulei, for the inner eye.
We recept for raptors bold enough to catch
The glimmer of gloss that brings sermonizing text
In concordance with a conscious stream, and next
We strike deeper to touchstones oblique to seek
The knowing nod of comprehension.
In contriteness and forgiving empathy, we prosy
The nobility of thought sought for freeing the soul
Encumbered with the silt of unresolved hints
Of fragments bound, encarements around
The precious, most secret eye within that the inner I.
Joe Chris Robertson 9/20/87
while waiting
at St. James Church
