Good Old Saint Lav

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, homage to Rudyard Kipling, The Egg-Shell

In a house at the end of Liberty Lane
lives a man named Lavender Mudge.
When I was a girl my grandmother asked me
to bring him a plateful of fudge.
He’s not always friendly with children, she said,
but it’s only because he is old.
We should always be kind to our neighbours, she said,
for kindness is dearer than gold.

So I took him the plateful and knocked on his door,
expecting an ogre or worse.
He invited me in to his trim little house;
over tea, he read me some verse
from a book that he slammed. This is trash, he said.
I’d expect nothing more from a ring-a-ding.
Not quite the description he used, then he said,
but you’re just a kid. You don’t know anything.

Today in the house at Liberty Lane,
there still lives a man named Lavender Mudge.
He doesn’t come out much, has little to say,
but this morning, I brought him some fudge.
There’s really no hope for the world, he said,
over tea that tasted like sludge.
But don’t look at me! I warned them, he said,
good old Lav of Perpetual Grudge.

Author’s note: This ditty is a shameless attempt to emulate Rudyard Kipling’s rollicking narrative poem called “The Egg-Shell”. A friend posted it on Facebook this morning, and I was immediately agog. If you’re curious, look it up. You’ll see what I mean. For all Kipling’s flaws (and we’ve all got ‘em), when he was on fire, he was genius.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2018
Image of Crooked Man by Ken Lamug

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The Drawing Near

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#bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish form poetry, Mesoamerican poetry

~~a glosa~~

You mingle with eagles,
you are as harmonious as tigers;
with this the flowers are sipped,
and we are a little happier here.

—“Canto Florida” (Xochicuicatl)

You there, yes, you! The one with sadness
in your eyes. I couldn’t help but notice
from my plot here in the Recoleta
that your pockets bulge with trinkets
from the merchants of oblivion. You scrape
the ground and wake us ancient regals
with your wailing, going on about the end
of times as if to garbage scrabbling
you were reduced like urban sea gulls.
You mingle with eagles!

Rise and fall, yadda-yadda, we’ve lived it
all and prophesied with bones and fecund
vines. Your sciences are different, but
you, like us, allow the god of gravity
to smother, then you grumble, whine,
all prissy—you could crackle! Fires
burn white-hot, consume with joy
the oxygen that races in. A life full-lived
uplifts the lied-upon above the liars.
You are as harmonious as tigers

and as dangerous as you allow
yourself to be amidst the grave
and colourless. Millennia, we’ve met
at crossroads, you en route to birth
and us to flower song. With gladness
from your tongue, you lightly tripped,
“Fear not, rejoice!” and so we did,
the newly dead. We dance with you
today, sing bright and sugar lipped;
with this the flowers are sipped,

dear princesses and princes, you’re
the rainbow oscillation, a continuum
to us who momentarily reside this side
of new creation. Whenever you are laughing
and orgasming, you catch glimpses of
the 8-shaped path but then forget. If you could hear
your physicists the moment they transpose
from mass to energy, you’d never mourn
again. See all that lives as the drawing near,
and we are a little happier here.

Happy Day of the Dead, 2018!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2018
Author’s note: The translation of “Canto Florida” comes from In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature—Pre-Colombian to the Present, Miguel Leon-Portilla and Earl Shorris.