( Feathers of Gold, Feathers of Silver art graphic courtesy of Bright Skylark Literary Productions ) In July 2006, I sat down to write a short simple thank you note to fellow @poets and +writers who had graciously wished me well on my birthday. To my surprise, the intended short simple note came out of my pen in the form of the following poem: ANGEL OF GRATITUDE Each, shaped from a heart divine—such is the nature of your humble wings. Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope. You are the good twin and the bad. Not arrogant, but jubilant…sweet… With grief or without, your flight commands awareness of joy beyond pain.     Holy starbright of infinite heavens, for these tears––I do thank you.     Just the fact that it was a poem was the first big surprise. The second was the style in which it was written, a variation on the haiku that I had never used before. Had my muse taken on the form of an

                           American troops maintaining their holiday spirit in the face of war .                                                           (Reuters photo by Saad Shalash) Why do you think certain creative works make such a powerful and lasting impact on a wide range of people? By way of example, consider the very edgy TV drama series Homeland , the current hit movie Lincoln , and Clint Eastwood’s modern film classic Letters from Iwo Jima ; or books such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and The Diary of Anne Frank . Their sustained impact likely endures because they achieve what the best of the cultural arts generally do–– they step beyond blinders of national restrictions to shine a transcendent light on the universality of the human experience . Poets, for the most part, define the transcendent essence of their human experience by the industries of their pens and spoken words. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11, many poets from different backgrounds put

"You were born a child of light's wonderful secret-- you return to the beauty you have always been." Quotation from the poem Holiday Letter for a Poet Gone to War from the book VISIONS OF A SKYLARK DRESSED IN BLACK by Aberjhani. One of the greater joys of my endeavors as an author and poet has been an occasional opportunity to compose poems, essays, and articles to supplement the vibrant works of visual artists with my own literary constructions. That was the case in 2011 when providing panel text for paintings featured in the extremely gifted artist Michele Wood’s I See the Rhythm of Gospel exhibition. Previously, I had been blessed with a similar honor when composing ekphrastic poems for the art of Luther E. Vann in ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love . And I’ve written any number of essays reviewing the works or chronicling the lives of other contemporary artists such as Allen Fireall (who currently, heartbreakingly, is challenged by the need for a hear

                                President Barack Obama on the cover of TIME Magazine . “Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind most of our colors are amazingly the same.” --from ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (Aberjhani) Despite the Associated Press’s recent gloomy poll on racial attitudes in the United States, most Americans would probably agree that race should not have played as powerful a role as it did in the 2012 presidential election campaign resulting in the ultimate re-election of Barack Obama . But there are at least two good reasons that it did. First, consider the approximately one million African-American men and women currently either imprisoned, on parole, or rushing blindly down a path likely to lead to prison. Too many of them grew up, during any given decade of the last half century, believing they were either destined to go to prison as some form of rites of passage, or they should expect to die ––as Trayvon Martin and my brother