March 13~ DODIE JONES

3/13/2025

Poetry fans, I'm so pleased to welcome my friend and fellow Upstate poet, Dodie Jones, to the SHINE family. Please enjoy two of her short form poems: "Belly of a Whale," and "Oak." Thank you, Dodie, for sharing your gift of words!

Belly of a Whale

Oak

Dodie Jones has found solace, hope, and strength in words for most of her life. Poetry has been a quiet and steady friend that has both given her space to absorb the depths of the world and connect to its heartbreak and beauty. After years of working and writing in the public policy sphere, she is focusing more and more on the impact of art to truly understand and realize our human condition as a means for lasting connection and change.
While there is a place for direct language and
dialogue, giving a voice to the intangible
may be what saves us.

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SHINE - International Poetry Series

From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is my honor to provide a home for their words through SHINE Poetry Series.

NOW IN PRINT!

Stars Over the Dordogne
BY SYLVIA PLATH
Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker
Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.
The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.
They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.
Nor do they send up fires where they fall
Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.
They are eaten immediately by the pines.

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars
Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.
And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.
The smaller and more timid never arrive at all
But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.
They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.
But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,
They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

The Big Dipper is my only familiar.
I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are
Hanging shyly under the studded horizon
Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem.
Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.
Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright
I am overlooking them by looking too hard.
Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

And what if the sky here is no different,
And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?
Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.
The few I am used to are plain and durable;
I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth
Or much company, or the mildness of the south.
They are too puritan and solitary for that--
When one of them falls it leaves a space,

A sense of absence in its old shining place.
And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,
I see those constellations in my head,
Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.
There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.
On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell
Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes
And drink the small night chill like news of home.

~~~

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