When WORDS Speak the Soul...

L A B Y R I N T H

This labyrinth of mind calls to my SOUL
To reach the SELF, a heartfelt goal
Enter this path to a center place
Hold to this knowing, your WILL to trace
The circle, the spiral, a labyrinth does make
A purposeful path, a journey to take
A circuitous travel to the center DIVINE
Within, without, be this journey mine
Know I of this center, its silent roar
Within, without, my SPIRIT to soar.

Rose Marie Raccioppi
Poet Laureate
Orangetown, New York

THE PULSE OF TIME

Certainty be an ever present variable of change
What lies ahead bears many a term and many a name
What with certainty can one with heart and mind proclaim
Be it that the breath present bears life its claim
The heart in its pulsing passion sounds its plea
This breath of life, the gift of time on to thee
Savor the ebb and flow of life and spirit within
Hear the rhythmic call beyond the oppressive din
Heed well the sounding glory sacred and divine
Hold in revered celebration life's gift, the pulse of time.

Rose Marie Raccioppi
Poet Laureate
Orangetown, New York

THIS POET'S WORD

These echoes of heart in sensibilities reveal
The TRUTH OF BEING bar conceal
Passions pulsing plea to be heard
And so be known this poet's word
Loss and lament a tear filled call
Joy and delight beyond befall
In revelation be known the depths of despair
All astride with blessed love and care
The rising sun and gone be the night
Held I in the embrace of the dawning light
The feel of the showering water sweet upon my skin
A baptism new, absolved I of all false sin
Judgments, reprisals, fallacious be their rein
For the SOUL'S PRESENCE knows not constrain
Confront and resolve the breath calls out
To purpose, to purpose, to purpose, devout.

Rose Marie Raccioppi
Poet Laureate
Orangetown, New York

Upon viewing anew, "Dead Poets Society."

English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. 
A Defence of Poetry 
Percy Bysshe Shelley

"... But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time..." A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 – 1822.

A Defence of Poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1909-14. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics ~ Full text available at:http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html