Off The Shelf Archive~Special Edition

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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

Off the Shelf Archive: March 2013

The archivist is on top of things for a change, and ready to switch out poems with alacrity. During this past month, I read some escapist literature, a mystery novel by Deborah Crombie called Dreaming of the Bones. The subject was the suicide of a woman poet of the Sixties, which turned out to actually be murder. No surprise there, plot-wise, but the poet character was obsessed with the life and poetry of WWI era poet Rupert Brooke. Each chapter heading had a quote from one of his poems, and thus I read more Rupert Brooke last month than I'd done in twenty years.

I was a bit surprised at how good he was, despite being obviously very young--and how good he might have become if he'd lived longer and lost some of the melodrama of youthful exuberance. Anyway, here is a bio page of his short but eventful life at Poets.org, for those interested.

The selection I've chosen for this month, by Rupert Brooke of course, is 

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

You'll find it here, on the Off the Shelf page, which now allows comments.

~*~

And here for final perusal before hitting the archives is last month's verse, Calypso's Island, by Archibald MacLeish:

Calypso's Island

by Archibald MacLeish

I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful

As you are: could not be. She is a woman,

Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of

Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb--

For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older,

Gray and older, sleep in that small room.

She is not beautiful as you, O golden!

You are immortal and will never change

And can make me immortal also, fold

Your garment round me, make me whole and strange

As those who live forever, not the while

That we live, keep me from those dogging dangers--

Ships and the wars--in this green, far-off island,

Silent of all but sea's eternal sound

Or sea-pine's when the lull of surf is silent.

Goddess, I know how excellent this ground,

What charmed contentment of the removed heart

The bees make in the lavender where pounding

Surf sounds far off and the bird that darts

Darts through its own eternity of light,

Motionless in motion, and the startled

Hare is startled into stone, the fly

Forever golden in the flickering glance

Of leafy sunlight that still holds it. I

Know you, goddess, and your caves that answer

Ocean's confused voices with a voice:

Your poplars where the storms are turned to dances;

Arms where the heart is turned. You give the choice

To hold forever what forever passes,

To hide from what will pass, forever. Moist,

Moist are your well-stones, goddess, cool your grasses!

And she--she is a woman with that fault

Of change that will be death in her at last!

Nevertheless I long for the cold, salt,

Restless, contending sea and for the island

Where the grass dies and the seasons alter:

Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.

Image: Island of Treasures, by Rene Magrite, 1942

All copyright belongs to the copyright holders.

via wikipaintings.org