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Axes, plows and greed are engaged in the clearing.
For now, all our lives are waged in the clearing.
As the stags compete, so the dams observe
Heads lowered to strike, enraged in the clearing.
Royal born, forest bred, once free to roam
The lion paces to and fro, caged in the clearing.
Bring us Puck and Lear; Harry, Shane and Luke
All the world’s stories are staged in the clearing.
Dreams of love lost, of children grown and gone
prod my heart. I sit alone, aged in the clearing.
Separate and remote, longing to return
Perchance Thy word leaves us assuaged in the clearing.
They say that April showers bring May flowers.
(November storms may also bring Mayflowers.)
April flurries? Just as you’re wondering
How much longer winter can cling — May flowers.
Crocuses, bluebells, tulips, daffodils,
Forsythia, pussy willows — spring! — mayflowers.
Black thumb, black rot, black spot, or black arts —
Possible causes of wilting mayflowers.
Collecting pollen for honey for the queen,
Does the careless bee ever sting mayflowers?
Fear not the underworld, Persephone,
There, too, some strange and wondrous thing may flower.
Beguiled, the hapless poet never knows
What, when the muse begins to sing, may flower.
Sparrow's rain song, exhalation of joy
pouring in an inculcation of joy.
"Butterfish, ballyhoo, chum!" reads the sign,
hand-lettered for a vacation of joy.
An old man waits at the beauty-shop curb
for her with anticipation of joy.
In the subway car's last window a scarf
(red) waves in a salutation of joy.
Slide in and dam up, proteins form ice jams
in the brain, a fenestration of joy.
Why do we ride in silence when the moon
horns point up with invitations of joy?
The violin student rushes through Bach,
eyes scrinched shut, an exultation of joy.
Rain drops hang from each pine needle tip,
world mirrors, precipitation of joy.
Fry garlic, shrimp, mushrooms, snowpeas, for you,
find love in a mastication of joy.
The fern, tightly scrolled in a fiddlehead
under snow in preparation of joy.
Where is earth's sweetest place? A baby's neck,
smooth flower stem, a creation of joy.
We fill a clear crystal bowl with plums,
Small deep indigo blue damask plums.
In New England summers on the Cape,
We walk the shore and pick wild beach plums.
We cut fruit in half, remove the pits
Revealing the yellow flesh of plums.
Canning jars are lined up in neat rows
Ready for us to ladle in plums.
The sweet juice drips down our chins as we
Bite into the dusky skins of plums.
We plan dessert, buy flour, sugar
And a paper bag filled with ripe plums.
Light candles and open bottles of
Burgundy wine the color of plums.
Of all the things of summer, the best
Are the ephemeral fragrant plums.
Summer ends as the sun sets early
In a sky streaked the color of plums.
On a country road, we stop the car
For the view, and Laura brings the plums.
In the pre-dawn light a doe raises its head, ears perked towards a distant roar;
something comes for it, its voice a thundering roar.
Hoarse and throaty calls frighten the doe away;
the hunter stops and, now confused, begins to roar.
When I hear that frustrated wailing, I begin to understand —
he who hungers must keep quiet, and keep still his roar.
Crouched deep into the withered crabgrass now, quivering but silent.
New prey passes — a fleeting moment — the hunter springs forth! it roars!
Stunned into silence, sudden anxieties flare.
Felled like a tall forest oak. The hunter eats well, amidst the echoes of its roar .
I take this solemn inspiration and leave.
By next moonlight, I find her sleeping, and I roar.
The camellias bloomed like a scarlet explosion
against glossy green leaves and grey explosions
of spring thunder, lightning, hail on the window
rattling like tiny white artillery explosions
all fueled by south-facing glimpses of sunlight,
distant and continuous thermonuclear explosions
reverberating from the center of our annual orbit
third-generation child of the universal explosion
driving the sap from the root to the flower
buds bursting open in soundless explosions!
These six ghazals are sequenced in a way that satisfies my sense of their dynamics. Kalim-ji's "A vale, a mead, a clearing" explores our need of a place to happen, a clearing where we can not only exist but act. The human impulse to clear the world has obvious dangers but is necessaary despite them. Stephanie Jones' "Mayflowers" continues that dynamism, although with a lightness arising from her deft variations on "may flowers." Her ghazal speaks a profusion of beings.
First clearing, then profusion, and then . . . joy. How many flavors of joy are there? Does each joy wave a red scarf? If this ghazal sings to you as it does to me, you'll experience it breathing with sparrows, ferns, violins, and babies.
The crystal bowl of plums in Laura Ciraolo's ghazal is a still life that doesn't stay still: all kinds of actions orbit the plums, recalling (for me) William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just To Say" and Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of the Jar," although this "Ghazal for Summer" is very much its own poem.
Zach Lome's "That Great and Ancient Voice" returns us, in its own way, to the clearing with which we began. As with the other poems, there's a dynamism throughout — the roar.
Tiel Aisha Ansari's "Soundless Explosions" culminates the summer dynamics that run through these ghazals — so dynamic that the couplets run, syntactically, from one to the next, rather than being entirely separate. Tiel Ansari violates the strict rules of the Persian ghazal, but, as with all skillful violations of rules (of readers' expectations) to a powerful effect. The dynamism, the force of summer and growth driving through this ghazal meant it could only be placed last as the climax of the series.