Tags
arcana, Celtic mythology, Elaine Stirling, free verse, Law of Attraction, mediocrity, poetry, quantum entanglement, Selkie, sonnet, The Corporate Storyteller, vibrational reality
the husbanding of poems
around certain
poems communities
gather around certain
poets worlds
some verses promise
a soft place to land
others shock and stop
the heart and may
not start it up again
you’ll know
the nature of the
communal poet by
the imitation that
surrounds him
and the maker
of worlds by
his space
in every instant
that I hold back ink
command its flow
upon the page or in
the reader’s eye
I lose my rights to
claim the title poet
fall behind to join
the ranks of free
verse tyranny
~~~
Selkie’s Final Word
Do not bring your weather to me, do not
share your salt-spray summer days, your basking
slathered bellies on bare rock. What you’ve caught
with net and reel is for private screening.
I’ve cut the lines you wrapped around my throat;
their length, at length, you may require. Measure
doldrums while you lament your creaking boat,
catches strung, digested for your pleasure.
“To know a man,” says the poet, “is to
be that man*,” but what you did not know of
you became my albatross, a weighted two
that nearly drowned us both. That was not love!
We keep alive what we resist, so fade.
Through my embrace may come fresh winds of trade.
(*line excerpted from “The Sail of Ulysses” by Wallace Stevens)
~~~
© Elaine Stirling, 2013
–Image of Selkie, artist unknown, from
celticanamcara.blogspot.ca
Oceantics 
“but what you did not know of
you became my albatross, a weighted two
that nearly drowned us both.
We keep alive what we resist, so fade.
Through my embrace may come fresh winds of trade.”
Such truth there on oh so many levels. Also, I don’t know what they call it when you have a word that finishes one thought even as you start another with the same word, but it is a fascinating thing for me to watch how you often use that in your poetry.
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Thank you, Creative. The technique you’ve noticed about the words is one of the coolest things poetry (and poets) have taught me. It’s called “enjambment”, and it’s the decision to line break (where you end your lines) with a sort of mini-cliffhanger. The effect, if you’re lucky, is that a line can be read on its own one way, and convey a different meaning when you carry on to the next line. There’s a hunger created for the reader who has to know what’s coming next because you’ve left them suspended with a certain “potential” thought, sometimes to change direction on them slightly as they continue to read to the thought’s punctuated or natural ending. At the very best times, a sort of echo of multiple meanings is created.
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