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Against All Earthly Fire

by Leland James


“Our earthly fire … no matter how fierce or
widespread it may be is always of limited extent.”
--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
 
A checkered board in frozen mates of stone
—seen from the hills that rise above the town--
moonlit in shadows cast on frozen ground:
castles, infrequent knights among the pawns.
 
Come near, the poet walks among the graves:
end notes in marble etched, traces grown faint
of mortal reigns; above the graves a rage,
a groan, a last embrace of earth’s heartache  
 
asking the overarching question echoed
in dove’s lament beyond the iron gate--
Stillness descends; a sudden comfort of snow
recasts the checkered plat, the mortal fate:    
 
the stones, in white, redress earthly desire,
a field of shields against all earthly fire.         
 
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Leland James is the author of three books of poetry. He has been published in over fifty journals and magazines worldwide, including Form Quarterly, HQ (The Haiku Quarterly), The South Carolina Review, and Midnight Circus. He was the winner of the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award for Poetry, The Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the Portland Pen Poetry Contest, the Writer’s Forum short poem contest, and a winner of an Atlanta Review's International Publication Prize. He was also a runner-up for the poetry prizes of Fish International (Ireland), the Welsh International, The London Magazine and the Society of Classical Poets. He received the Franklin-Christoph Merit Award for Poetry in 2008 and was nominated for a recent Pushcart Prize.