I am a bit late to Kerry O'Connor's always challenging Wednesday event, where she asked us to write a prelude to a poem as yet, or possibly forever unwritten, a story still to be told. I hope I've come up with one of those.
Image: Born Again, by Remedios Varo via wikipaintings.org All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.
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 poemsare 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.
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.
"..Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It's based on a novel by a man named Lear And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer..." ~Lennon/McCartney
I have to admit, when anyone mentions the inimitable Edward Lear, the above song is the first thing I think of, so that's why it's the opening for my response to Kerry's challenge at Real Toads on this versatile and surprising man whose birthday falls in May. As an inventor of amusingly surreal figurative language in his popular nonsense rhymes for children, often inset with his own quirky drawings, Lear was a big influence on John Lennon, among many others.
Lear also legitimatized and popularized the limerick, so I started out with one of those:
Limerick
There once was an author of silly
who dressed up as a thoroughbred filly
in a mauve feathered hat.
He liked it like that,
but for racing a dress was too frilly.
Yes, well...moving on.....
I also learned from Kerry's article that Lear was a landscape painter and illustrator, and she suggested we might write something inspired by his visual art, so here is my moderately nonsensical response to that:
The Anthropomorphic Imperative
'I believe, old boy,' I heard Parrot say
to Tortoise, 'it was yesterday
as you were artfully, amphibiously
pontificating in a pondmud sea,
that you stated it wasn't faith, in fountains,
but bitching that moved mountains?'
Tortoise lifted his leathery head,
he swallowed twice, Oh, yes,' he said,
'I'm sure the stars are nagging the moon,
and the moon yells the sun up to every noon
for without the blessed safety of blame,
who would leave its shell, or know its name?'
Parrot looked down from his monocle-tree,
'Respectfully, sir, I must disagree.
As a bird, I may know only one thing
and that is I don't know anything,
but whenever I squawk in a cave of swallows,
a confusion of shadows bursts up from the hollows.
When the May wind finally decides to blow
tulips throw petals like coloured snow,
green rain dances sideways. I've come to see
that where we are stranded luminously,
perilously, between earth and sky,
Kerry O'Connor discusses the work of English author, painter, illustrator and poet Edward Lear, and challenges us to deal with his nonsense. I've cast the tortoise in a rather negative role here, tho I'm actually quite fond of them--but someone has to be the heavy.
