‘The Cymbal Player’ and Other Poetry by Martin Elster

The Cymbal Player

As bows and fingers quiver strings,
as lungs and lips whip up the air,
as notes soar on great falcon wings,

one player, seated in his chair
like a finch hid in a maple tree,
as if the creature wouldn’t dare

trill out above the symphony
(perhaps in fear of being caught
by a raptor high above the lea),

begins to rise like an afterthought
amid the pianissimos
and, like a hunter’s rifle shot

as bright as ninety-nine rainbows
of overtones, he spreads, then hits
two plates together. The ether glows

like sunlight through the woods. He sits
back down. And yet the clang still rings
and darts and dances, flutters, flits

and, for the merest moment, clings,
then fades away like all brief things.

The Purple Sun

Holy cow! We’re holding hands,
reaching across our fenceless lands
and even (an outlandish notion!)
across unfathomed sheets of ocean.

Go and snigger, go and smirk,
spread rumors that I’ve gone berserk,
yet there’s no harm in fantasizing,
hoping when we see the rising
in the west of a purple sun,
a grander age will have begun.

A falcon pounces on a pigeon,
a zealot murders for “religion,”
a hunter fells the heartiest moose,
and there are rapists on the loose.
An asteroid could wipe out life
as neatly as a nutjob’s knife
will slit the throat of a supporter
of peace and harmony and order.

Yet when we see that purple sun
a grander age will have begun
and we shall clasp each other’s hands
across all borders and all lands.
Oh, we shall hold each other’s hands
across our vast and fenceless lands.

We people are Earth’s mayhem masters.
While quakes and floods and such disasters
come like plagues of rabid rats
to terrorize us, autocrats
faster than a lightning flash
turn hope to ash, fling bombs that smash
the edifices of our dreams,
stifle our panic-stricken screams
and deafen dolphin, dog, and deer.

But if we hold out on this sphere,
we’ll see a purple coin appear;
we’ll watch it climb the sky and crest
the cool-blue mountains in the west
and (shall I say it?) link our hands
across all borders and all lands
and even (an outlandish notion!)
across unfathomed sheets of ocean,
beaming, laughing, lost in the glee
of being a community.

Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first place in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014, and “Talcott Mountain” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Chimaera.