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La Sirena
At some point they ceased to be beautiful.
Even their voices. Bare breasts, bare arms, screams
Savage as acid swamped the scholar-priest
His reasoned teaching fading from his lips.
Bare breasts, bare arms, black stripes across their eyes.
The cover granted to anonymous hate.
That doesn’t make it pretty. Here’s no charm.
Their lust for power took a different form.
O hero, see you trust the hands that tie you.
See that you turn your face while sailing past.
Though you must choose to hear, watch how you listen.
Put faith now in the axis of the mast.
Meanwhile, children, gather at the hand lens
And see this raindrop, fresh as morning’s news.
Its round top is a secret circus tent
Where tiny mermaids swim in seas of dew.
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El Paraguas
Drip drop. Drip drop. Drop drop drop.
The streets were cleared. There was no rain that night
His black cars rolled again into the City.
His face—a pale impression through dark glass.
“I stay up half the night.” And on this night
He seemed profoundly lonely. Kings must be.
Even the ones crowned in their people’s hearts.
Almost a child’s look as he looked up,
Peered through the window for a glimpse of home.
He came unto his own. He stood unknown,
A stranger in the city he helped build.
Rain dashed around him. Almost no one knew
Whose face that black umbrella now obscured.
Windows in many stories blazed beyond.
“To see the land I love.” Whose was that form?
It takes a lot of drops to make a storm.
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Monika Cooper is an American family woman.
Enchanting and mysterious, Monika. Fun to read!
Thank you, Paul. I’m glad you enjoyed them.
These are two well-crafted and aesthetically sophisticated poems. “La Sirena” is especially striking, in that it takes an ancient myth and, rather than just retelling it, makes it an occasion for psychological scrutiny, mystery, and warning. The first two quatrains depict the beauty and the evil of the Sirens; the next two advise the bound hero how to deal with them, and then add an unexpected finale about children examining a raindrop with a magnifying lens, and seeing “tiny mermaids” (small life forms? baby Sirens?) swimming in it.
The rhyme is only sporadic in the poem, but it doesn’t seem to matter at all. And the iambic pentameter is not clunky or sing-songish, and so close to normal speech that the poem seems to be overheard conversation. The mystery of the “scholar-priest” (it’s not Odysseus) is left unresolved.
“El Paraguas” (the umbrella) is more mysterious, and one is tempted to treat it as an allegory. Who is this sad and lonely King coming home late at night to his City?
Thank you, Dr. Salemi, for your close reading and rich comments on my poems. Exactly right about the “tiny mermaids” 🙂
As you say, the scholar-priest is not Odysseus. What’s behind those first two stanzas was a current event from several years ago. I don’t remember the priest’s name or the topic of his lecture but it was drowned out and effectively cancelled by a mob of banshees. The pictures from the event were so symbolic of something in the current situation and reminiscent of that passage in the Odyssey that they never left my memory. And, in retrospect, the event foretold the further rise of “cancel culture.”
Yes, you can read El Paraguas as an allegory. Looking at your second comment now, the king and the city in the poem do have parallels to Jesus and the City of the Jerusalem. A heart-breaking but ultimately triumphant, even nuptial, dynamic.
And I’m glad that “I stay up half the night” made you think of Gethsemane. The two line fragments in quotes make up a line from Theodore Roethke’s poem “Night Journey,” the final line. Gerard Manley Hopkins once had a wish to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem by night, considered that it would be more full of devotion than a daylight tour. Roethke’s poem is a sweeping, bittersweet view of the beauty of America from a midnight train.
Thank you again for your comment. Your thoughts have given me an idea of how to title the series these poems were taken from.
Really good stuff, Monika. However you do what you do, please keep on doing it. Your words and the images they convey fairly jump off the page.
Thank you! I hope there may be a few more where these came from.
For three days now I have been re-reading “El Paraguas,” trying to crack its allegory (if indeed it is an allegory). The only thing that rings a bell is the sentence “He came unto his own” — which is reminiscent of John’s words in scripture: “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.”
If the “King” in the poem is Christ, then “the city he helped build” might be construed as those of Christ’s own people who rejected Him. Then the first line and the last line of the poem (with their imagery of drops) could be references to Christ’s bloody sacrifice.
I also suspect that the two parts of the poem in quotation marks should be considered as separated segments of one sentence that can be read as this:
I stay up half the night… to see the land I love.
And if the “King” is Christ, then this sentence might refer to the Agony in the Garden, the Last Supper, the darkness at the end of the Crucifixion, or even Christ’s sojourn in hell to release the just ones.
Joe, I thought this might be the currently exiled (former) Spanish king, Juan Carlos, but I am going to contact Monika. She may have missed that her poem was published.
-Evan
That’s an interesting guess, Evan. Juan Carlos sounds like someone who should have a poem about him!
Monika, I came to these creations as an excited reader and your words have lifted me to a place of awe, admiration and confusion… which is why I have been reluctant to comment. What do I see here? Images, tropes and familiarities are all dancing in my periphery… but I cannot grab any one of them and rein it in. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. Is this a bad thing? Definitely not. I just don’t understand these poems in a rational sense… is it intentional and creative, or is it because I am stupid… I’m not sure… and I’m not sure I want to know. I will say this – the poems are awesome… in a very cryptic way.
Thank you, Susan. Part of the reason for the mystery is that the poems I’ve been sending are from a larger series and the different poems cast light on each other in different ways. Having them published in drops like this makes me a little nervous but it seems the right path for them for now. (And I am so glad this place exists and that the editor was willing to take a risk on them.) I think with a lot of poetry it’s ok, even desirable, not to understand too soon: to catch the music before you catch the meaning. Anyway, I’m glad you are reading and that you’re intrigued rather than turned away by the cryptic in these poems and thank you again for your comment.
I also want to thank all readers of these poems who haven’t commented. It’s wonderful to think that you’re thinking about them.