Sadly, I’ve nothing new to report. Life is still tremendously getting in the way of everything literary. Keep your ears pricked up, however, for an update on Ministers of Grace within the next month.
I missed National Poetry Day in the UK. ::siiiiigh:: I’d hoped to have at least one draft of something out by then, but it just didn’t happen.
Better late than never? Here’s an 11 x 18 poem with the exception of the last line, which is 12, I first drafted a couple of weeks ago when I was sitting by the sea in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Poetry nerds might recognize Gloucester as the location of the Dry Salvages, which is one of the reasons I was excited to get up to Cape Ann. It was a deliciously foggy morning when I threw down these words into my journal. I was still bewitched by the stars from the night before, when I’d walked along Long Beach in Rockport with my beau and had the opportunity to take a long look at the constellation Corona Borealis. The brightest star in that constellation is known by a few names: Alphecca is the most popular and recognizable, although Gemma and Astaroth are acceptable alternatives. I’ve always known it as Alphecca, so when I discovered its other monikers while redrafting it, I was fantastically pleased that esta estrella es una tocaya to my antagonist supreme of Ministers of Grace.
Might this be…coincidence? Or just an opportunity for me to write in Spanglish?
OK Enough intro. Read on, kids. ♥ EAB
Cor[o]net
I have questions for that wild nest of bright stars
to the north, that halved flywheel guiding blurry
seafarers from empire to empire. Up close,
your Gemmastone is a sister to the sun
as a clot of steely brilliance behind a
cloud. Tell me: which music do you sing when the
anchor drops and that center orb dips into
the Milky Way? Do you perpetrate the slow,
steady pedalling of a pocket watch, or
do you aim for our applause with a flushed out
flourish as your leitmotif? Your string of spheres
in chorus, each voice varies so that the tune is
a half-step higher to my sister than it lilts
in my own ears, so that he hears the rumble
of the sea in your harmonies when I can
detect the sharp, clinging shimmer of the wind.
Won’t you please live on in both conditions, as
instrument and adornment, and hold the center?