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Shishaldin
Radiant angel, bathed in light,
Gleaming opalescent white
_On the smooth, sheer snow
Clothing your smooth symmetry–
Smooth cone, sculpted gracefully
_Like no peak I know—
Rising from the icy sea,
Rising high, majestically
_Piercing through the blue;
Rising to the diamond sun,
Your light’s source, the only one
_Shining over you.
But beneath your glowing face
Hidden deep in icy grace
__Burns a heart of fire,
When it flares you quake and swell,
Unleash its magmatic hell,
__Belch it from your spire.
Though your summit pierces shrouds
Of sea-fog to kiss the clouds,
__Earthbound you remain—
Spanning, joining earth and sky,
Hell and Heaven, low and high,
__Rising through each plane.
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Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. In addition to the Society’s publications, his poems and prose works have appeared in The Chained Muse Review, Indiana Voice Journal, and other literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.
Notice the use of “magmatic” in the third stanza — this looks like an adjectival coinage from “magma.” One of the nice things about traditional poetry is that it makes use of the existing vocabulary of a language but also builds on it with regular and logical developments.
I like your juxtaposition of the dormant volcano as a “radiant angel” having a “heart of fire”, and “magmatic” is a fantastic adjective.
Beautiful, inspired rhyme scheme and visual imagery with a hidden message (at least for me) that compares external beauty with the fires of hell that burn underneath the surface.
Adam, your poem is breathtaking. Thank you.
I love the beautiful imagery, and also the consistency of your metrical pattern and rhyme scheme from verse to verse.
Everybody loves a volcano, just so long as it isn’t close by. You have brought it to the fore, and everybody loves you. I wonder why. Thanks for this, for I am always looking for something better than ashes.
Thank you Adam, grand simplicity.
Contrast and convergence and the three levels of Earthly existence.