Poem #12 for Poetry Month-Alexandrine Couplet

An Alexandrine couplet is an English form with a twelve syllable line, a caesura or pause after the sixth syllable and for the final rhyming syllables, there is a predominantly iambic metre, or ~/ (light, stressed) delivery.

This popped into my head late last night as I was remembering our farm at the end of a gravel country road and how we could tell someone was driving on it by the high dust cloud raised for several miles. The anticipation built until we saw the dust cloud linger over a neighbour’s driveway and then settle. As I was trying to inject some urgency into a poem, I began thinking of the dust cloud not as a welcome diversion of surprise guests but as a more sinister harbinger in another place, another time.

Photograph is of arid Colorado ranch land from a train window in 2012, the kind of land where dust raised by wheels, or many hooves, would linger like airborne spoor for miles. 

Reading the Signs

We saw dust clouds linger. We knew the hills beckoned.

We could not dally here; slavery, we reckoned

and gathered the children. This is a true story.

Let me tell it to you, no tales of false glory

should fill your ears like glue. We fled to save our skins,

ran at night, slept through days. This is how it begins.

Poem #11 for Poetry Month-Japanese Mondo

The Japanese mondo is the perfect form for short snappers, only two lines, non-metric, non-rhyming. The book, The Shapes of Our Singing, recommends using at least a 5 and 7 syllable line. 

The crucial elements are that the first line is a question which is answered, in as profound, subtle or downright elusive a manner as possible, by the second line. I’ve written quite a few about rain and fog... This photo was taken in 2011 when I was working at the Cape Scott Lightstation in December. It has dramatic weather, to put it mildly, and amazing beaches nearby. We got soaked nearly every time but it was so wonderful and wild that we just got used to it!

Rain Mondo #3

Why curse the weather?

Just keep on breathing today.

Poem #10 for Poetry Month-Free Verse

This is, compared to using ancient poetic forms, a free verse, a semi-lyrical narrative poem but I include it here because our son survived an ordeal with a prolonged perforated appendix some years ago. And yesterday culminated a week of great good news for our "boy", who is now a happy and healthy twenty-seven year old with a glowing future.

I got off our lightstation by helicopter, thanks to the compassionate and speedy Coast Guard service for occasions like this, and then flew with a commercial plane and drove another hundred miles up into the Okanagan to see him. After the initial shock and then relief, of sorts as he had a long road to recovery, I was struck by this dignified old cowboy coming in to the hospital. Sometimes when we are in a state of shock, we notice the oddest things.

Here's to our great BC ambulance attendants, an outstanding family doctor in Nakusp, BC and my friends and family who helped me get through this in all kinds of ways so that we can now cheer on our future inventive engineer today. Photo of Seamus leaping on Lennard Island, Christmas 2014.

Vernon Hospital in August

Now here comes a wizened man

in pressed blue jeans a clean checked shirt

dusted cowboy boots no hat

hurrying through the new-fangled glass doors

holding a shiny tin can low below his leather belt

like a pair of pliers or tin snips in his right hand the can

stripped of its wrapper - pork’n’beans, chili con carne,

peaches? filled now with sweet peas

I will add thee, sweet pea, to the very short list

of things in this world that money cannot buy:

true love & home-grown tomatoes

sweet peas & immortality

Poem #9 for Poetry Month-Cornish Fourteenth Century Stanza

The rains have returned but I have a cheerful 14^th century Cornish poem to offer today. It is a reworking of a journal entry, a typical free-form first draft collection of images. 

We spent a wonderful but far too brief time on a tiny island in Mexico this past winter. I am an avid amateur birdwatcher, Canada’s second most popular hobby after gardening, another passion. My binoculars and Golden Guide to Field Identification of Birds of North America go with me wherever I go, to work at another lightstation or to holiday in or near North America.

The Cornish Fourteenth Century Stanza has four to nine syllables in each line and a rhyme scheme of A A B C C B. The photo is of our vocal friend, the great-tailed grackle.

Isla Mujeres Morning

For Jeff

Our polyglot alarm clock

Precedes the flashy courtyard cock.

The great-tailed grackle stops and starts

Trills, descants, two-toned chirps

He shrieks on-key then gently, burps.

Your songs called "breaking sticks", dear hearts!

More gently coos the turtledove

Woos us from our dreams, my love,

Tugs us outside to the new day

To watch tiny scholars speeding down

Cobbled streets in this old town.

We sip good coffee, wish we could stay...

Poem #8 for Poetry Month-Japanese dodoitsu

After weeks of solitary thumb-sized scouts, the island is now buzzing with hummingbirds.  Hummingbirds, mostly rufous, sometimes Anna’s, are so speedy that when our vast swaths of honeysuckle vines bloom, the aggressive rufous dive-bomb each other and just barely miss us out working. Sometimes they bonk themselves into our windows, which must be a terrible shock to them but so far, as with this little fellow in the photo, they’ve flown off after a dazed rest and we can only hope they’ve recovered successfully.

I’m using a Japanese form, the dodoitsu, which is unrhymed, non-metrical, four lines and with a syllable count of 7 7 7 5. It’s a merciful relief after trying to write a Greek paean with its dramatic emoting on every third syllable. I found myself feeling like a ham stage actor with an irritating vocal lunging tic so I bade farewell to the Greeks as they were just too much for my stiff and sore post-gardening self this morning. I raided my serene Japanese poetry file for you today.

Rufous Hummingbird Dodoitsu #1

Little fledgling on the ground

How came you there my pretty?

Feathers ruffled eyes half-mast?

Sugar water quick!

Hummingbird War Dodoitsu #2

Four gram warriors zooming

Angry whirring winds resound

How many men do you know

Fight over flowers?