Off the Shelf Archive ~Special Edition Redux

Today, May 22nd, is a certain poet's birthday--one of my favorites, who also happens to be one of the best of friends, (and poets) around.

I am speaking of the inimitable Fireblossom, also known by the real world sobriquet of Shay Caroline Simmons. She has recently published a collection of her poems on Amazon, entitled, My Mad Love, and earlier in the month I put a selection from it on my Off The Shelf page. I promised another one, and so here it is. I saved my very favorite for last.

It's called The Far Garden, one of the first poems I read by Shay that blew me away, something she does pretty routinely, but you know what they say about first times. This one is my idea of magic.

You can find more of Shay's outstanding poetry at her blog, The Word Garden.

Happy Birthday, Shay, and thanks for letting me share your work here, on the Off The Shelf Page.

~*~

Here is the previous selection from My Mad Love: The Healing.

The Healing

I spread five fingers and five seasons came;

I kept the one that had no name.

I closed them round the stepchild month;

She felt like love when love is done.

I stuffed the lost one in my mouth,

And spoke things scratching to get out.

The Gypsy wrapped around my eyes,

and by blue evening I was blind.

She wormed her way into my ear

and whispered quite like you, my dear.

She burrowed deep into my brain,

Sweet and sharp like blade and cane.

But when the sweet bitch found my heart,

She bit and sealed the broken part.

© Shay Caroline Simmons, 

2008-2013,  All Rights Reserved.

Used with permission.

from the book, My Mad Love; Poems Out In The Noonday Sun, 

by Shay Caroline Simmons

Image: Artist Unknown, via Facebook

Off The Shelf Archive~Special Edition

Available at Amazon

Welcome to a special two part edition of the Off The Shelf Archives. Since the month of April was devoted to tirelessly torturing myself into somehow scribbling a poem every day, the Off the Shelf page has been languishing in abandonment. So, to make up for this neglect, I am having two poems featured there this month, and both will be by one of my favorite poets of all time, Shay Caroline Simmons, more often encountered on the internet as Fireblossom, who also happens to be my BFF and, along with Kelli Simpson (Mama Zen) co-author of our recently released poetry anthology, Gemini/Scorpio/Capricorn.

Shay, interviewed sipping Vanilla Chai at her palatial beach house in Antarctica, refused to answer most of my personal questions about how she survives all winter on the ice floes, sleeping on polar bears for warmth and playing gypsy violin to passing beluga whales, but did deign to grant me permission to plug her book...I mean, feature two poems from My Mad Love,  pictured above, a comprehensive collection of her work covering the last five years at her blog  Shay's Word Garden.  

NOTE: These poems are under copyright, so don't even think about using them in your next collection of seasonally-inspired unicorn  haikus.

The first selection is entitled, The Healing, and is one of Shay's infrequent but always highly effective forays into rhyme. It was very difficult choosing only two poems, but this one makes an instant entry into the brain with its sparse and haunting short couplets, and for the unexpectedly sharp end.



You can find it here, on the Off The Shelf page.

                                           

~*~

And below, presented for a last reading before it goes into the vaults, is the selection from March, a sonnet by Rupert Brook:

Sonnet: I said I splendidly loved you; it's not true 

I said I splendidly loved you; it's not true.
Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.
On gods or fools the high risk falls -- on you --
The clean clear bitter-sweet that's not for me.
Love soars from earth to ecstasies unwist.
Love is flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell.
But -- there are wanderers in the middle mist,
Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell
Whether they love at all, or, loving, whom:
An old song's lady, a fool in fancy dress,
Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom;
For love of Love, or from heart's loneliness.
Pleasure's not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,
And do not love at all. Of these am I.

~Rupert Brooke

Image: Seascape, by Caude Monet, 1866

Public domain via wikipaintings.org