Lucid Lightning: Poems and Prose by Victor Peñaranda

These are poems of (and as) luminous (as) silence—from a poet with the quiet heart of a pilgrim seeking “fallen petals” in mountain paths and streams of kindness and grace. In these songs to sacred space, we find ourselves transported, hearing and marveling at that delicate voice of reverence whose prayers are answered with stillness, thus happiness. —Krip Yuson Raised in a land of such amazing fecundity of sea, earth, and sky, we should not want for anything. Yet the irony of our state is that we are always hungry, wanting more. We are forever poor, spending the hours of our days scrabbling for possessions that leave us even more poverty-stricken than even before. We are empty, not knowing where or what or how to fill that emptiness. Peñaranda takes us to an austere landscape filled with silence, the empty sky, a lone bird testing the pure air. He draws for us “a glacier charged with patience,” a place where all sensations are “ephemeral as a kiss.” Surely such a place is terra incog