Handsome Man

Tags

acceptance, Elaine Stirling, family history, Father's Day, form poetry, grandfathers, long life, marriages, Navarrete quatrain, nostalgia, reconciliation, reminiscence

Johannes F. Kaskela (1899-1964)

Handsome man, you flatter me
with violets and violin, midsummer fire
lights your smile, while aurora borealis lends
you emeralds and silk to pour across my feet.

Handsome man, you flatten me
with shallow dreams that burn like paper
matches littering our bed with cardboard
perfumed crowds I don’t recall inviting.

Handsome man, you sweep away
the ashes of the promises I know you tried
to keep the crowds like hairs upon your head
from thinning, yet they tore your hopes apart.

Handsome man, you left too soon
the violin now sits upon a shelf unplayed
the sodden paper matches light no fires
save the ashen pipe dreams of my heart.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
–image of my grandfather,
photographed by Oliver Maki

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Rendezvous

Tags

acceptance, alienation, alignment, authenticity, Elaine Stirling, letting go of negative, nonconformity, poetry, self-expression, self-worth, source energy

How alien I am to me
when choosing from my wounds
to speak, from gaping hollows
left by loves perceived inadequate
they served their time, they’re
gone and yet on guard I stand
divisible, emotions made a
soldiery, my only uniformity
I snap into salute, attention
piqued when those of petty or
attractive rank show stripes
of pain that match my own, or
better, not as great! For then
I can magnanimous appear
in empathy, subordinates will
surely note my stature and remark
among themselves upon my
generosity, no scent of tyranny
emits from these well-practiced
tears spilled out in clever
and effective rhyme.

How strange I make myself
to me, how dubious a friend
when tolerant I am of less
than intimate; most talk is small
enough without my help; our time
deep-squandered bits of nothing
much—agree or not, approve
I don’t or do, so what?

Everyone deserves better!
Of them all, no one will miss
me slipping out, I’m sure, the
door was never locked from
either side, the weak applause
already out of earshot, moonlit
sky, Orion near to standing
whispers in collusion with the
evening star, no metaphors
denied. Across the sky, they’re
welcoming; this rendezvous
of me with Me is love, reunified
and infinitely true.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Photograph of Orion constellation
from tomsastroblog.com

Feathering Bits of Nothing Much

Tags

acceptance, boredom, Elaine Stirling, momentum, reality, self-pity

Image from fiddlersfoundblogspot.ca, 2010

Momentum builds in the trough
of the wave, not the crest, in the
depths of the ocean, not the
glittering turquoise surface.

Spend less time polishing
your opinion of things, people,
places, events like a servant
in the sub-basement kitchen of
someone else’s manor house,
and more time listening to the
shape and quality of the “no”
inside your head, and you
might become aware that
you’re polishing tin and
it’s wearing
thin.

Monotony, you say? asks
the Universe in majestic, ever-
granting wanting-to-be sureness.

Rub, rub, rub.

Very well then. rubrubrubrubrub
rubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrub…

Our fear of invisibility may be
greater than our fear of death
and so to every thunderclap we
add our peep, lest we not be
heard, lest we be thought
less of, or thought not at all.

Guess what? Mama bird
stopped listening to our
cheeps long ago and
thunder doesn’t care.

The feathered nest we ache for
requires our leaving the fundament
that someone else constructed for us;

and if, after a respectable number
of circuits flown in all manner of sky
one cannot yet swallow that birds
and worms negotiate agreement
in their creating sustenance of
evermore, evermore, then it’s
best, I suppose, to learn to live
with being eaten.

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

Effortless, the world…

Tags

acceptance, Elaine Stirling, poetry, tranquility

as a soft-edged chittering
background hum of give and wait
and speak and take and hope and hear
the smiles of creation unstrained holds
and rocks a hammock from the center
of gravity lift on either side balancing
the only possibility for this movable stasis
more rise not less the talk grows
brighter laughter more serene
I watch you coming into view
as if you’d always been wrapped around
my center lifting me, the swing rotates
from lateral to full-on frontal mastery
of kisses, you and me, the source
of the motion of the untroubled universe.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012