Remembering My Friend Paulette Jiles

In her poem “Driving at Night to Uvalde,” Paulette Jiles wrote of seeing a freight train’s lights through a windshield and being caught up in the moment when “everything is radiant, electrified / The tangled bush and the highway are lit up in black and gold.” In the next line, she transformed this moment of sensory experience into a sense of her own mission: “A poet’s job is to see things like this / We wait for a message of hope and courage.”Paulette felt shining messages everywhere, roaring through landscapes, tugging us backward in time, deeper into everything that surrounds us. With profound originality and grace, she shaped the messages and voices she heard into whole worlds. For many years, she lived simply in a cabin…

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