For a Time

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Navarrete quatrain, poetry

For a time, you were the wall
against which I threw snowballs
shaped like poems that blew into my face.
Now you are the mist above ruins.

For a time, you were the millstone
that sat upon my collarbone and chafed
me till I bled and mastered slouching.
Now you rise like smoke rings.

For a time, you were the bottleneck
that calcified my sweetest words the more
I tried to push them them through your veins.
Now you are my sacral bowl.

For a time, you were the poetry
that ground my winter wheat to fine
and stirred my torpid blood to blue.
Now you are my legacy.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Photograph by author

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Were You Present?

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Elaine Stirling, form poetry, Navarrete quatrain

Were you present at the dawn of Creation?
I’m quite sure I saw you at the shimmering edge
of a pond where the tuberose dipped to admit
something too wet and too young to fly.

Were you present at the rise of thought
when certainty gave way to resistant beetles
with hard-shelled plans and maps they’d
imagined while dreaming of salt flats?

Were you present at the fullness of expression
when, upright and landlocked, we learned
how to cry and to calculate distance from spirit
to flesh, convincing ourselves we were lost?

Were you present at the evening of tides
when seas recalled their sweet mother, the pond,
and our tears falling salty revived acrid spirits
across the land? I’m quite sure you were.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014
Image from photobucket.com

For You

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Gavriel Navarro, Navarrete quatrain, poetry

I picked for you an olive branch
with stem that bows in honour of
the years of peace that you have sown
in hearts by leading us to poetry.

I picked for you a laurel wreath,
the caesar’s crown of victory
to mark your joyful destiny
between the paths of birth and death.

I picked for you a mustard seed;
so tiny was my faith but you,
dear gardener, grew it to a tree
that soars and shades, revives us all.

I picked for you a single rose
from Canaan’s olive grove, removed
the thorns to clear your path. We’ll meet
you near the mustard tree to celebrate.

Happy birthday, Gavriel!

~~~

Gavriel Navarro is a contemporary poet who has published three volumes of poetry. His first, The Wind and the Sea, is my personal favourite. I’ve featured the cover of his second book, Fire and Earth, because it’s beautiful and showcases Gavriel’s amazing photography and design talents. Fire and Earth also contains an excerpt from my soon to be published novel, Daughters of Babylon.

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

When This Body

Tags

contemporary form poetry, detachment, Elaine Stirling, letting go, moving past, Navarrete quatrain, physicality, reconciliation, self love

When this body is awash with love
of self, I see you free of worry lines
that once defined you fall away
revealing sun flares of exuberance.

When this body sees your vibrancy
coronas form around the simplest
words like hope and be and I
let go of distances formidable.

When this body moves through paths
we cleared together aeons past
converge to higher ground, remembering
volcanoes and their blinding ash.

When this body cashes in on all
she’s seen and done, the love
that crowns your form will lift us
both from grim, erupting histories.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Through

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beauty, brave new business leadership, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, freedom, interpretation, nagual, Navarrete quatrain, new mythology, Queen of Heaven, re-creation, self-perception, successful transitions, The Corporate Storyteller, Tower of Babel, transformation, vibrational reality

I am through with committees
of old men, their dour laws
entangling, corrupt, assigning fall
to life when birthright seeks to rise.

I am through with cliques
of sisters locked in regimens of iron
man & green, so terrified of sustenance
that bondage smells like bacon.

I am through with junkyards
of the empty word, booby-trapped,
spring-loaded to react, defending injuries
that should have quit their weeping years ago.

I am through to fields abloom
impassioned by the ever-towering man
where every day’s a feast of freedom multi-hued
& words like me can dance, sweet naked in the rain.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

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

We Are: An Early Birthday Message

Tags

creativity, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, imagination, individuality, Navarrete quatrain, necessary tasks, poetry and prose

We are strengthened by imagination
sufficient to release a narrative suspended
from great heights to shatter at feet
kicking stones madly across continents.

We are shattered by hopes too vast
to contain in vessels paltrified by ego
and bleak histories that splinter the seams
of the well-intended like cheaply built arks.

We are scattered by indifference
to mysteries whose clues refuse to stand
still long enough for us to fire pot shots
at what appears to be unrepenting will.

We are gathered by scope of tasks
imagined and individual into watertight
vessels large enough for one with
will sufficient to master the highest seas.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image: woodblock of the Sino-Japanese war
(1894-95) from Throwing off Asia II

A Quietude of Crowds

Tags

Elaine Stirling, form poetry, Navarrete quatrain, The Corporate Storyteller, the leadership of allowing, wisdom of the crowds

image of lupins from onlyhdwallpapers.com

I pushed through crowds in search
of friends who fought on foreign shores
for liberty and found the broken body
of the quiet one who said, I will not fight.

I pushed through crowds in search
of friends who clamour loud for privacy
with news, I’ve found a place that’s safe!
They came, but no one shared their secrets.

I pushed through crowds in search
of friends who yearn to know the intimate,
and everywhere I turned they backed away
with signs that read, don’t look, don’t touch!

I pushed to know the wisdom of the crowds
who fight and learned there is a place where
secrets are held dear and friends move freely
touching in the quiet, pairing solitude of here.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Möbius Minute

Tags

Elaine Stirling, form poetry, humility, leadership, Navarrete quatrain, non-aggression, paradox, reversals, T.S. Eliot

carnivorous Venus fly trap

For HB

In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

~~~

Will you be my page, my number three,
or must you, like the rest, attempt to push
against the knighthood and the kingdoms
that are mine, not yours, to hold or raid?

Will you be the tabula, my writing slate
though deeply veined, engraved with lines
that are not mine, yet empty; or will you
prove to be another flat impermeable stone?

Will you be the trail that infolds
behind me like the fly-trap leaves that wait
in stillness for the unsuspecting gnat, that I
might pass in safety through these realms?

And should you answer, yes, you’ll be the page
who blazes past the sole and pair; unshod I walk
your slated ground, you’ll guide the expeditions
of multitudes who seek the safety of our shores.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Acquainting Strange

Tags

absence, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, Gavriel Navarro, longing, Navarrete quatrain, reunion

A Navarrete quatrain*

How strange these absences that call upon

Image by K. Kovarik, 2011

the masses of the unexplained to bring you

close enough to hope—perchance to know,

that what we had, long past, uplifts us still.

~

How strange these empty thoughts, their

tubular assault like whistles in a headwind,

scraps of words they make no sound, and 

yet, your lips, to me, stay moist and readable.

~

How strange your nonexistence in this life

where oxygen and carbons breathe a name

diurnal, tea leaves spilling cross my desk, they

draw your face and mine eternally as one.

~

This strangeness that besieges us is overturning

fast to presence. Winds, be calmed. I hear

your poetry in rise and fall, your lips and chest

they draw me in. We’ve done, at last, with leaving.  

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2012

*The Navarrete quatrain is a poetry form developed by Gavriel Navarro. Simple in appearance, it’s deceptively tricky to write (at least, for me). If you’re up for a challenge and, if you’re lucky, a heightened state, you can find the directions for the Navarrete here at Gavriel’s Muse.