Ward Kelley -- A Man and His Poetry

*Joan Secrets Herself Inside the Flames*
	God’s voice is rarely helpful unless it’s heard by all people . . . instead of zeroed within that place, beside your memory, where your heart whispers and whispers chilling prayers. The battles were not the point, or the peasantry . . . or your affair with acclaim; all the accomplishments were only guidance toward the lesson of the pyre. And here inside the flames the voice of God explains your final chore . . . you are an illustration of fire and chilling courage, you are an indictment of a race who would think to burn its benefactors, a race so befuddled, a maiden must bear these resplendent pains and at the last moments of her life, there inside the agony, she must stretch her hands forward to forgive the people who continue to destroy the very pinnacle of their own selves. Now they must walk your metaphor far into some future generation, who will at last understand the acute levers between mercy and civilization . . . until then you burn secretly, but allure us all.
	Joan of Arc (1412-1431) earned, in the words of Louis Kossuth, an imposing distinction: since the writing of human history began, she is the only person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a nation at the age of seventeen. Although she achieved many victories for her beloved Dauphin, by age nineteen she had been tried for heresy, then burned at the stake. She was also the only person in history ever cannonized as a saint of the Catholic church who had once been executed as a heretic by the very same church.


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