Tags
Elaine Stirling, folklore, giants, Kalevala, leadership, poetry
Along the edge of dark blue waters
cold and lonely northern waters
lies the mighty sleeping giant
known as Pentti Koskenkorva.
~
Touch your ear, my name is Peter
is the name sense of this giant
slumbering mass of earth and eskers
sleeping off a dearth of questions,
~
never asked and seldom answered,
Pentti Koskenkorva blended
with the ironwood around him.
What’s the point of being giant,
~
holding answers, living pliant
like the waves and mighty waters,
when no human ever seeks him?
Wingless, bored and flighty human,
~
seeking, never finding human
fears the energy of motion
rooted to the blind emotions
hunger, thirst and lust his potions.
~
Stirs the waters till they’re muddy
tears at hearts until they’re bloody
numbed and callous, nothing lingers
of the knowledge at his fingers.
~
Once mankind, he loved to stalk
with cougars and the wandering stocks
of caribou, he slurped with bears
the lush blueberries, now he hides
~
like quivering rabbit, locked within
his lazy habits—why I can’t
and why I won’t—the total sum
his daily rote, oh bloody hum…
~
ho bloody hum, the giant’s heard
it all before, he’s had his fill
of lamentation, what’s become
of jubilation? Are there none
~
whose incantations might arouse
a celebration of the mind
and sense? But no one answers him.
Sleeping giant Koskenkorva,
~
though he snores and rumbles nightly,
offers truth that’s spoken rightly.
Touch your ear, my name is Peter
loses hope, there are no leaders.
~
Then one day a wandering girl child
knobby kneed and grubby girl child
drops a rock into a pool and
watches circles rippling and
~
fraught with strange imagining, she
hears an angry sputtering. The
hillock where she eats her lunch, it
grinds from side to side as if
~
a chin resided neath the brush
of saskatoon and thorny bush.
On outcrop of a grayish hue
she dances, then with eyes of blue
~
astonished sees the wrinkling brow
of granite fold and glacial fault
scrunch up, a breeze, then mightily
the woods blow out a giant sneeze.
~~~
To be continued, don’t know when…
Meanwhile, here is a lively sample of
Finnish rune singing by the folk group
Värttinä. If you listen closely, you may
catch the Kalevala meter that my poem
follows within their tune “Nahkaruoska”,
which means “leather whip”.
© poem by Elaine Stirling, 2012
© oil pastel of Antero Vipunen by Hanna Kantokorpi, 1991
Oceantics 
Vartina, yes! I’m intrigued by the “invisible giant” and wonder, and wonder, Elaine. In my dream last night I encountered a huge serpent, and remembered an aesop saying: From the same flower the serpent sucks poison and the bee sucks honey. Then my Chemist guru reminds me that honey is high in fructose–poison in abundanc.For me the giant may indeed be what we label as evil, without wondering, wondering. Thanks for this (I hear also the cadence of “by the shores of gichigoome (sp) the Nikomis poem by…???)
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lol, Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”. I had those very gitche gumee phrases written near my desk for days. I like your take on the giant; whatever we label as overwhelming, we might also call evil, when what’s really being called upon is to grow stronger. In Kalevala, the wizard Vainamoinen tortures the poor sleeping giant to attain three missing words he needs for an incantation. I didn’t want to do that to Pentti.
Great dream, Lutia! Perhaps we’ll see a poem or a story?
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Here I am drinking at the oceantics in the middle of the night. This one has the welcomed taste of pre-continued B’Earth, a Sleeping-wanting-to-Talk-Earth that awaits my writing-singing.
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It’s good sometimes to be reminded that this rune-singing, Medicine Wheel, intentionality stuff works, doesn’t it? 😉 Seriously, though…but not too serious, it’s the joyful paths that bring us the desired results, even when, or especially when we have to conjure it out of apparently nothing. A delight to visit with you here, Creative.
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