The Clowns Are Staying Home Today

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Canadian poet, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elaine Stirling, isolation, medieval Spanish fixed verse, quarantine, seasonal poetry, sestina

The clowns are staying home today. The crowds
have paid their chits, the popcorn gal has learned
her bit, to shake and salt, the tent pole’s
rigged, I’ve polished all my epaulets,
but something small and mean,
gargantuan, has taken down our show.

The beast, let’s call him Ovid, starts to show
his claws and sticky coronet in crowds
whose throats just itch a bit. It doesn’t mean
a thing, the bigwigs say. Have you not learned
that crying wolf is in your head? Let’s
all stay rational. Set up the poles,

we’ll make a go of it! The poles
of left and right who love to show
how much they know will never say, let’s
get along. Conflict brings the crowds.
It’s our best selling point! We’ve learned
to milk, to squeeze the teats of mean.

As a barker, though, I do not mean
to rattle this strange circus, bring the poles
down on our heads. I haven’t learned
yet—have you?—how to navigate a no-show
of a billion tents with rumbling crowds
who’ve nowhere left to go. Let’s

sit with this a while, please. She who lets
the river calmly pass respects the mean
whose curve now shapes the crowds.
Our global weight is snapping poles
in two, four, six, eight. A primal show
is playing to us all, the simple and the learned.

Oh, the things we will have learned
when Gargantua has shat his last! Let’s
not forget who rules the inner show:
the human spirit, heart, who mean—
and ultimately do—well. Set up the poles,
sweet clowns. We’re expecting great crowds!

Author’s Note: This is a sestina, a medieval Spanish poetic form that uses a spiraling repetition of six end words to bring the reader through a vortex, and hopefully a new state of mind by the end.

May we all rise above this soon, and thrive!

© Elaine Stirling, 2020
The image comes from a 2014 blog entitled “Porque ríes, payaso?” Why do you laugh, clown? I don’t know the artist or the blogger’s name.

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Viral Ides

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Canadian poet, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elaine Stirling, Ides of March, seasonal poetry, sonnet

Ides, strange ides today, we crowd as one, bugged,
we march in step, in place, nowhere to go,
can’t cross the seas, a need to be unplugged
and yet to know, I fear the sneeze, the blow.
How many weeks, you say, before the weak
can self-identify? How far is wise,
for when I think of you and thoughts turn bleak,
have I not compromised my own demise?
Immunity’s a pitchy thing, a shade
that darts, a ninja one cannot deploy
mid-storm, and yet, might there not be some made
and ready balm inside me to enjoy?
May sweet simplicity befriend us through
these weeks we learn to be instead of do.

© Elaine Stirling, 2020

Sending wishes of good health to all!

Robertson, dear Robertson

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#CanadianPoet, Christmas poem, Elaine Stirling, Robertson Davies, seasonal poetry, terza rima

Photo taken by Dick Loek/Toronto Star in December 1990.

—being a visit of the spirited kind with the great Canadian man of letters, in the Dantean poetic form of terza rima

I

O Robertson, dear Robertson, I dast
not trouble thee in Paradise, Nirvana,
nor in Asgard’s halls if that’s where you now cast

your mighty nets of word and mirth. I wanna
seem as erudite and clever, Heaven knows,
as you, and not some whinging prima donna,

but as mercury subsides, the windy blows
of those who’d tarnish what is silver and sublime
of this great time are getting up my nose,

attempting to convince me it’s a crime
or mark of low intelligence to cheer
what’s goodly and expanding to a prime

of human understanding. With your clear
and unobstructed view of where we’re headed
and my obstinate refusal to adhere

to doom’s dark drivel, I am wedded
to the notion that together we might salvage
something priceless from the leaded

and corrupt events reported by the savage
and vindictive, by the weary and obstructive,
by the arguers whose logic seeks to ravage

all that’s mystical and unexplained. It’s relative,
I know, that yay and nay together must reside
in every possibility, but their order is subjective.

Am I right, or do I labour with false pride?

II

O mortal, winsome mortal, such delight
I take in finding you again with Thor’s great hammer
pitted ‘gainst depressives’ native right

to cringe beneath your cheerful yammer,
seeking common ground and seldom finding,
both of you reduced to wincing stammer.

Where is the proof? demands the grinding
intellect. I do not care, retorts the sprite
whose visage to the cynic is full blinding.

The passing fact, experienced, is right
but only in the moment to the blood and brains
of that to whom the truth gave light.

The gap between the witness who explains
her wonder with insistence to the rest
learns swiftly what it means to “take great pains”.

There is scant gain in it. You’re blessed,
make no mistake, but cursive souls
like yours who flow too easily ingest

the poisons of heredity. The holes
of graves preceding you contain no tales
worth digging up again. Their bells have tolled.

All life is made to vivify. What this day fails,
ignored, tomorrow proudly shows her worth.
Who keeps their wit and chin up, paradise regales.

In this tendering season of light’s rebirth,
rest easy. Good abounds on Heaven and Earth!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2017

Nightfall of the Iguana, 2017

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#bringingbacktheglosa, #PabloNeruda, Canadian poet, Canto General, Elaine Stirling, medieval Spanish fixed verse, narrative poetry, New Year's poem 2017, seasonal poetry, Waldeen

~~a trilogy of glosas, concluded~~

The jaguar brushed leaves
with his phosphorescent absence,
the puma speeds through bracken
like devouring fire.

—from “Some Beasts”, Pablo Neruda,
in his epic Canto General,
translation by Waldeen

~~~

Not long ago, I found a strange map
in the ruins of a Maracaibo mansion,
the corners held down with rough-cut rubies
round and plump as duck eggs. Palimpsests
throbbed like blue-black veins across the chart—
illegible, unscarred by zealots and thieves.
I was told by the raggedy viejo who sleeps
underneath that the map and her routes
can be viewed by whoever believes
the jaguar brushed leaves

with her tail and the weasely dictator fell.
Claims such as these, they never sit well
with the rushed and the rational. Being neither
that day, I asked the old man to explain.
Once a year, he said, when defenses
deflate, humankind’s natural omniscience
is recalled and recorded upon this map
by shades of the recently departed who’ve
dropped all pretence of sorrow and vehemence.
With his phosphorescent absence

of political skews and racial miscues,
he hovered over the map, and with a finger
gnarled as ebony burl, he cruised along
routes I’d been known to frequent and
rubbed them all out, pronouncing every one
irrelevant. Time to accept there’s no fact in
the past with the power to deplete or subvert
your future. Take a page from the wild. When
the cayman’s not hungry, he’s loath to attack, and
the puma speeds through bracken.

Likewise, in the seam between moments—and
years—that appear to engender and justify
fear, you will find a clear trail laid out by the good
that is you and your boundaryless kin. You are
timely, well compassed. Walk on, begin.
And now it is time for this Job to expire.
He dropped the fat rubies into a sack.
He rolled up the mansion and with it the map,
spinning all he had shown me into a gyre
like devouring fire…

Wishing you a happy and magical New Year!

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

Easter Prayer (of the faithless)

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alexandrines, Canadian poet, Easter, Elaine Stirling, fourteeners, Poulter's measure, seasonal poetry

While sleet and bitter winds compel these bones to stay inside
and blood runs hot with sorrow for the burning world,
I turn my gaze to You with whom my senses won’t abide;
for what it’s worth, I offer these few hollow words.

What’s come of life, this endless grind, I once received with joy?
The ghouls portending tragedy each day prove true.
Disclaimers, thugs, and maniacs so eager to deploy
discouragement at every turn, what’s wrong with you?

They muttered in Jerusalem, threw carnivals in Rome.
Berserkers in Byzantium, cossacks through Minsk,
at every time in every age, we’re driven from our home
by those convinced they’ve been raw dealt, same, ever since.

And yet, in each new moment, some young mother meets her child.
A father sees his daughter wed; the groom, his bride
has paid some kindness forward secretly. A teacher mild
praises; a student’s weary spirit fills with pride.

If You exist somehow beyond the cruelty and reason
or better yet reside, calm, within my choices,
then roll the stone away and lift me to the new season.
Grant us grace to hear and speak with truer voices.

~~~

This is my first attempt at a poetic meter known as the Poulter’s measure. Poulters, or sellers of poultry, were known in the Elizabethan era to vary their quantity of a dozen between 14 and 12. You may be familiar with 13 as a baker’s dozen—same idea.

A poem in Poulter’s measure alternates lines of 14 syllables with alexandrines, or lines of 12 syllables. The rhythm creates a kind of solemnity that reminds me of acolytes moving slowly down a cathedral aisle toward the altar. Wherever you reside along the spectrum of Easter, Eostre, or “Finally, a long weekend!”, may it be a happy one.

© Elaine Stirling, 2016

On Days Like This

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, seasonal poetry

I love days when melting snow plings rubaiyat
about my feet on city streets, and streams
of poetry wend through my mind, accelerate
while, grocery laden, I can’t reach to dam them.

I love days when slush, exhaust and salt-
encrusted, slows me down enough to let
verse, blank and free-range, have their play.
Syllabic counters, take your salary—and go!

I love days when I don’t care who’s driving
through the neighbourhood with licence plates
from out of state to cipher what I’ve conjugated
from the verbs I do not talk about, except to friends.

On days like this, when winter strokes a gentle
cooling hand across this cabin-fevered brow
I catapult like daffodils and spring from woolly
bed sheets to the silken possibilities of now.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2016
Image of melting snow: photographer unknown

May the Fourth

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Elaine Stirling, May the Fourth, poetry for fun, seasonal poetry

Be with me now, the means
continuously given
by the millions
through a cilia of ease.
Relax and fan these veins
and arteries with great success
conjunctive to the leafing out
of tulip trees

and when the comedy
of what comes next exhausts
me, when I’m glued like fly strips
to the nearest tragedy, I could
recall what Baal Shem Tov
most loved to say—just blink,
my friend, it’s time enough
for Providence to lay
another basket
at your feet

if this be true—
if this, not that
for betterment of peace
of mind is all I need to choose,
what need have I of floodgates,
sentry walls or cable news?
The ground I walk upon
of all I’ve asked for
and forgotten heaves
and bucks in time—
we are an ocean, after all—
with nesting cormorants
whose chicks with narwhals
are convening to arrive
at optimal, sublime
orchestral entry points.

The fourth is with me now
and you, eternally, the way.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Photograph by author

Do not see me poor, Sir!

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Elaine Stirling, medieval fixed verse, seasonal poetry, villanelle

A villanelle

Upon the city streets at night, there is a stir
of festive lights and huddled mounds of wool,
but do not see me poor, Sir!

Sirens wail, Emergency! screech past us in a blur,
hoping to resuscitate the will to live in full
upon the city streets at night. There is a stir

that crackles round designer gloves and fur
gift-wrapped, the fear of cost a deathly pull,
but do not see me poor, Sir!

In creeping steps, not unlike you, I did incur
harsh debts that threw me to this pavement dull.
Upon the city streets at night, there is a stir

of rattling cups and bells, your pity to recur.
In countless ways, I’ve been a fool,
but do not see me poor, Sir!

Circumstance alone cannot deter
a future bright imagined as a jewel
upon the city streets at night. There is a stir,
but do not see me poor, Sir!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Ghost of Ages, Part II

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an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, Elaine Stirling, fun with homonyms, Halloween tales, humourous verse, narrative poetry, seasonal poetry, spooky spoof, wordplay

You can read the opening episode here.

***

My guests, said
the ghost, ushering us
to a den with a view
of a city I knew from
my dreams with great
lions and bulls, bas-
relief on the walls.
Help yourself to some
balls, they’re fresh roast
in a crystallized rum
with a cinnamon gum
that, when chewed while
aware, may offer the
sum of a notion of why
you are here, and not
caught in a jam made
of highways and rage
and thwarted desires
for cool, frothy beer.

The woman beside me
let out a shriek, for the
jam that he spoke of
writhed in a dish near
the balls with a wee silver
spoon, a thick reddish
gloop, it moved slowly
in circles of brake lights
and headlights and on-
ramps no bigger than
trimmings of nail that
rose up and fell and
they rose up and fell…

“There are no freaking
exits in this jam,”
said the man to whom I
supposed was his wife.

None at all, said our
host. This is perfectly
manifest jam, Le Trafic,
our bestseller, guaranteed
to stay stuck in your
teeth or your gut or
wherever—

“Whoa-oh!” cried the
boy who had lowered
his ear to the jam while
munching a handful of
cinnamon balls. “You can
hear them all cursing!”

Indeed, said our host
with mellifluous tones,
which just goes to show,
you may put on a front
to appear how you’d like
to be seen, but a place
true exists where we
store all the rest, for
whenever you wish to
draw from your past.

“And gum up the
present,” I ventured
at last and then cringed,
for the ghost whom
I’d hoped would forget
I was there cast his eye
on me now, and his smile
of filed teeth like a saw
to fell trees caused
an itch at my neck that
I didn’t dare scratch,
and those lunatic eyes,
neither waxing nor waning
but forever half, they
didn’t look through me,
they looked in between,
and whatever he saw
made his grin fall away.

We’ll be heading now
to your rooms, said
our host, and we all let
out sighs that assized our
particular moods from
excited to grim. I followed
the rest down a hall
and upstairs. In my
mind, I was holding a
space in the verb he had
used when the smile
dropped away—not
beheading, be heading,
of course, I thought with
a timbre of courage, but
the itch it grew worse, and
I tried not to think of a toppling
yew, or how, when reversed
‘cross the ages of man, the
R and the E at the end of
my vibe when I fell would
reverb: T-I-M-B-E-RRRRRR!

to be concluded…

© Elaine Stirling, 2013