Small boat with chipped paint,
abandoned ‘mong reeds, settles
twice-daily to rest.
From cold mud, air seeps
Through shallow salty froth. Safe…
‘til plucked next low tide.
Slick, slimy sludge cakes
on clam-digger’s boots. His hands,
Frozen, bloody, work.
Ice-winged, big, mad gulls
Glide in wide arcs. Bulging eyes
spy just-spilled garbage.
Madonna rising
from atop the hill, with grace,
can be seen from here.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Five from Belle Isle Marsh, Slack-tide, January
Posted by Pat Trombly at 6:51 AM
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4 comments:
Belle Isle Marsh is a small, protected area at East Boston's border with Winthrop. The surrounding area is largely commercial. The relationship between man and nature is at that location not without its own beauty but it is less than ideal.
Overlooking the site, in the distance, on a hill, is in fact the site of a 35-foot statue of the BVM, symbolizing for me the potential for redemption - in contrast to the present situation my judgment of which is represented with another, vague, Biblical reference (Moses, though not rescued) in the first stanza.
No disrespect is meant to the discipline of traditional haiku in my adjusting slightly its rules and my focus outside pure aesthetic natural beauty - I attempt to capture and celebrate natural beauty by depicting the imperfect relationship between nature and the only species capable of appreciating it, and assigning to that relationship a spiritual significance.
Pat, I liked the first 4 but the last one I thre me - I first thought of Madonna the pop singer rising for some reason and then I wanted it to be the moon.
I'm envious, we're in ice and fog, can't see the hills, never mind their tops.
Gwilym
What a great phrase "slack tide" is.
I heard it first this morning on the radio driving to work. It's in a poem by the 2009 T S Eliot poetry prize winner Jen Hadfield. She's from the Shetland Islands.
And then I come home from work check the blog and there is the word again. Wonderful! Here's a link to the poem.
http://www.douglasrobertson.co.uk/wordpress/index.php
Hadn't heart it but yeah, you got me using a word you'll see or hear four times in your lifetime, one in a marine environment and three in poems. I've always hated words like that. "Languid" comes to mind.
I did want to convey that the tide was mid-level but mid-tide means the mid-tidal zone - I forget whether it's where you will or won't find an anemone.
You'd have to know East Boston - one thing the last two generations of Italians and the present generation of South Americans have in common, apart from futbol, is Roman Catholicism. The BVM is a VBD. I don't judge religious myths, rites or symbols on their merits; rather like forms I use them as vehicles to convey meaning. I wanted to say that there's still hope for the site - and the statue is prominent and kind of watches over all of Orient Heights, thus making for a convenient vehicle. To illustrate the time spent not realizing the site's potential, the first stanza references a myth from pre-Christian tradition.
As for Madonna the performer - yes well if I'd used imagery from the film Revolver, perhaps.
...I'll have that song "Borderline" in my head now until I can turn my car radio on. Thank you for that.
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