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True North
Light, opalescent, swirls the arctic bright;
Siberian, Scandinavian, Alaskan lights.
The morning sun, Aurora, hides her face.
King David sings a chariot’s fiery flight,
a psalmody of light, exultant grace
above the open grave of polar night.
Midnight: a momentary ache of blue,
a tranquility of light, ascendant blue,
a Bethlehem of blue, a Eucharist of light;
from darkness risen tamarack and spruce
attend the celebration; suspended night.
Blue light, lifting the shroud, the color true.
Moments of faith embrace a world of ice
—veracities of light against the polar night.
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Leland James is the author of five poetry collections, four children’s books in verse, and a book on creative writing and poetry craft. He has published over three hundred poems worldwide including The Lyric, Rattle, London Magazine, The South Carolina Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New Millennium Writings, The American Poetry Review, The Haiku Quarterly, The American Cowboy, and The Ekphrastic Review. He was the winner of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and has won or received honors in many other competitions, both in the USA and Europe. Leland has been featured in American Life in Poetry and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
www.lelandjamespoet.com & https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/leland-james
Nice job, Leland!
A deft touch you have, Leland. But I lost the thread (or maybe it was gossamer all the time) near the end, and the hexameter final line threw me off a bit. Nevertheless, the poem is wonderfully evocative.
I wonder if you are allowing for elisions in your scan. Might be how you get to an extra foot. Anyway, my view is, a poem works or it doesn’t. Gaming the feet doesn’t really matter. Try scanning Yeats or Gerald Manley Hopkins… But God bless you for being interested in meter. My view, meter and rhyme are tools not an ideology. It, for me, cannot be, the poem worked, but there was a foot wrong. Poems either work or they don’t. A foot WRONG? It sometimes can make all the difference in the right direction. But again, I pick no argument. I’m glad you liked the poem, with whatever flaws you perceive. Thanks for reading.
Poems either work or they don’t. Well said and yours does.
I did not regard the metrical irregularities or the syntactic disconnections as flaws, Leland; as you say, the poem works, even if in mysterious ways, which can be a very good thing. But preach me no Yeats — I have found the bulk of his work quite disappointing. Unlike some other authors I could name (e.g. Wilbur & Auden), his best poems are the ones most anthologized, for which he will long be remembered. You talk the talk, Leland, but you also walk the walk. Whenever I see your name come up in an SCP post, I know I’m in for a good ride. Yet, to tell the truth, I cannot see how any elision(s) would amputate a foot from that last line, and I see no reason for any such attempt, unless, as you also indicate, metrical purity were indeed an ideological benchmark.
We are just getting to the warm days of Spring here in New York, but this is the perfect poem to pull out again in deep, dark winter. I like the geographic jumping in the second line. It makes me wonder where you wrote this: The U.P.?
Thank for your interest. I live in the tip of the Michigan mitten, an hour from the Mackinaw Bridge to the Upper Peninsula; occasional Northern Lights. Blue light all the time. Sometimes 250+ inches of snow. My wife, of fifty-plus years, and I live in a 100-year old cabin, with modern addition, in the woods on Lake Bellaire. The distinct seasons, the hard winter, the closeness to the wonders and and dangers of nature I find conducive to creativity.
You never cease to amaze us
I read this many times, to hear it. But I was drawn in from the beginning by the exciting swirl of the second line. The progression from King David, to Bethlehem, to Eucharist: also a thrilling ascending spiral.
“The open grave of polar night” is an vertiginous abyss and maybe an allusion to the empty tomb of the Gospel? But what I hear most in this poem is a proclamation of the positive, glorious reality of light over and against the unreality of evil.
What a strikingly beautiful poem. I particularly like the admirable and memorable image ‘Bethlehem of blue’ – a magnificent touch! Thank you, Leland.
And thank you for reading.