Blog

Image: Poetry Postcard with digitally manipulated heron photo
 

It’s that time of year, so no surprise, we got hit with another windstorm last weekend.  Thankfully, for us, it was merely inconvenient, with a brief power outage.  But those 90k gusts can be unnerving.  I grew up with big winds off the Bay of Fundy and the Tantramar marshes.  As a child, I found the winter winds that whistled and howled around the house at night kind of thrilling. Cozied under the puff in my bed, I felt safe and secure, knowing my parents would deal with any calamities that might come our way – and as it turned out, none did.  Thinking about this reminded me of another time I felt protected in wind storms.  We were living in Vancouver, I’d been on stress leave from my job and I realized it was past time for me to move on.  The day I applied for a new position, one I very much wanted, a heron arrived to spend the night in the Douglas Firs behind our house. It was winter, a windy one, making me nervous in part because a few years earlier the top of one of those trees came crashing down in a storm, just missing our neighbour's garage. Anyway,  that heron came and stayed every single night for three months, until the job I wanted was mine.  And then it left.  Which prompted the poem I’m posting today, Guardian, from Suddenly So Much (Exile Editions).

Guardian

Hope sways with the heron on a black bough
gone wild — the storm sleepless, trying
to pitch them from their nest into the night
like brittle wings clipped and dumped with the rest
of the dead, the broken and fallen crushing mauve
primrose and hyacinth; faith fading to darkness
as bleak as the back of the moon where nightmares menace
unfettered by a lucid dawn, gentle
breeze or daydream.  Yet the heron on a black
bough gone wild in a wind storm, sleepless
throughout the night, faced with the rest of the dead,
the broken and fallen, the crushed primrose and hyacinth
at the edge of a bleak and moonless future filled
with a nightmare menace unfettered by dawn's lucid
tread, gentle breeze or daydream — regains
his precarious balance, holding on to hope.


This poem is roughly patterned after a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 16 lines in which Adam extols Eve’s beauty.  The form he used was, as Edward LeComte says, “a figure of repetition known as epanadiplosis, or ‘the recapitulator’.” In essence, this is a series that starts and ends with the same word; there is a turn in the poem in which the negatives become positive (from John Milton Paradise Lost and Other Poems, (Mentor, 1981), pp 132-133, ftnote).  Milton’s recapitulator can be found here: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/paradise-lost-book-iv (scroll down to lines 641 – 656, starting and ending with the word "sweet").