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    Winter Ferry
    Winter Ferry
    Winter Ferry
    Ebook101 pages46 minutes

    Winter Ferry

    By Elizabeth Elliott

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    About this ebook

    Challenge: Write A Poem That Makes Personal To a Reader How The Human Sin Of Excess Carbon Is Causing Climate Change
    This third book of Elliott's poetry plunges into the effort of causing readers to experience the grief Elliott experiences as she watches the window closing, that last window of time during which a universally fought battle against excess human carbon could still have a positive effect.
    Ten years ago, information published from the reputable scientific community about present and future climate change, caused Elliott an unbearable grief. "More like a huge weight", she says, and she was unable to throw it off. And the years kept passing when we still had time to stop, or at least significantly slow down the carbon warming process. "How could the world's leaders give this increasing danger so little committed attention? How could some ignore it all together? As for the deniers ---" Elliott was sure that millions of ordinary people were enduring the same amazed burden of sorrow as she. But how to effectively communicate such feelings? The title poem, "Winter Ferry" is her answer. Embedded within the narrative of a ferry's last voyage are two stories that recall what we have lost: fresh pears and a miracle. The second poem in this same first section drives home the sense of loss: "Jericho Bay" is a short lyric about a summer day, taken for granted, long ago. In four further sections, poems speak to various subjects: to race, Where Is My Color?, to beauty, Plagiarize Beauty, to religion, Annunciation, to family, Sue, Folding Shirts, to evolution, Question For Darwin, and to music, Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass. But the first section matters.

    Elliott's poetry explores the human condition in our quests for power and truth, for persistence, justice and hope. On our need for individuality, a purpose, and for achieving our goals with courage and persistence. Her poems show us our innocence and our temptations, our gratitude and appreciation, and our freedom. Our struggle to overcome loss and death, evil and harm, war and conflict and to find love and joy with the healing power of our spirit and our psyche. And our capacity to play, to study nature, science, and time, to create art and beauty, to sense the paradox and to experience the transformation of our lives. Here is the poetry of life, and a life of poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWInter Press LLC
    Release dateJun 28, 2015
    ISBN9780986297076
    Winter Ferry
    Author

    Elizabeth Elliott

    Elizabeth Elliott spent the early part of her life growing up on an island off the coast of Maine. She writes, “From an early age I stood by my mother's chair and in her doorway and watched her paint. How could it not seem completely natural for me to have a pencil in my hand and write? (I still have an encyclopedia I wrote in 1942 when I was ten.) I am the lucky child of four unusual creative parents that were deeply involved in the world (two step-parents were acquired shortly after the end of the war). I asked my father, who had dedicated his life to improve the world once if he thought he'd gotten anywhere. He said he thought of himself as a Johnny Appleseed, dropping seeds of fruitful new ideas that would gradually be picked up, planted and grown. Since then nothing has arisen to deter my love of people, and my love of writing poetry. Unremitting care for the world is my passion. So at the age of 75, having received only rejections for my poetry, I decided to publish my own books, using covers of my own choosing, and writing on the subjects of my life: children and human issues, love and politics, religion and the arts --the world I experience all around me every day so I can share it with my readers.” Today Elizabeth still resides on the island off the Maine coast, but also spends her time in the hills of western Massachusetts and the islands of the Florida Keys with her wonderful poetry reading, history minded, art imbued husband. Elizabeth once said that she could feel a poem begin in her core and travel up within her body, down her arm, and out onto the page. And the results, the books she has published and are yet to be published, describe the conflict men and women find in ourselves and with each other, nature, our purpose and goals, our beliefs, and also the hope and healing we find in our spirit as we are transformed by the passage of time.

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      Book preview

      Winter Ferry - Elizabeth Elliott

      Winter Ferry

      Poems

      ***

      By Elizabeth Elliott

      www.elizabethelliottpoetry.com

      Published by Winter Press LLC

      www.winterpresspublishing.com

      In memory of

      Donald Oakes

      and

      who asked the right question

      at the right time

      Distributed by Smashwords

      Discover these other titles by Elizabeth Elliott:

      Burn All Night (1998)

      Placate The Jaws(2010)

      Love And It’s Interruptions(2015)

      Copyright 2014 Elizabeth Elliott

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior authorization of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

      ISBN 978-0-9862970-7-6 (Epub)

      The cover is a detail of The Way Home by the american painter Evelina Kats, 1936-1999.

      Cover Design by Kat Moran

      ONE

      Winter Ferry

      He had been one of the old men who worked on the docks,

      had a hundred stories to tell, and did,

      he talked to us now amid the dry shafts of flying ice,

      amid the way to go forward,

      with only the compass keeping steady.

      He said, What came over didn't necessarily come back.

      Nor was it all one with him.

      He sometimes told of being home,

      of the Scotsman she had married

      when it was too late and the accident too near,

      not that they were any Tristan and Isolde,

      they were both older than berries left on the trees for birds,

      and she was not, as they say, she of the white hands,

      but the color of royal.

      He said, "They called her Aubergine,

      she came from across another channel, not ours;

      she was delicately spaced in vowel and flesh.

      Already survivors of at least one blast of month-long sleet,

      she cleaved to him as though forever had been found,

      though he loved to tease and say he was the first

      to see and love, the first to know 'always'."

      But here again we saw land

      and knew he'd warned us truly,

      that what had crossed

      would not, necessarily, cross back.

      Too late now. For them. The usual disrepair

      of some past glory

      brought them down together,

      not just to the quiet street they knew and where they were known,

      but fallen to the Dragon Pen of cliff,

      to gravel the rivenning sea had not yet hobbed away.

      Their bones are still down there, he said.

      "Bright talent that other one as well. But Mestre fingers

      pinched upon the atlas of an expanding world

      and he sold himself,

      got run in for a line of cocaine snort

      when he'd been poised to try for more."

      He said, " Boys who saw that mountaintop cave in,

      turned to trees no bigger than a poplar limb."

      Gravel on a hook of land,

      deserted even then of boats, a boy gone bad.

      Like a bright talent that land once was.

      And he swung the wheel hard left

      to bring us back to center as the ball in a tornado

      strikes past the target. "Our children froze in unearned fame,

      the slingshot tabloids made to bring the giants down."

      Again we sighted land, and until the clouds skewed in again

      to knead us in a death-soft vise, saw land again,

      then land still further on, beyond any mile,

      and we knew we had no destination.

      Oh yes, he said, "once we all had faces that were real,

      but they have blurred to the discard of history."

      And what had crossed

      would necessarily not return.

      The night kept coming on,

      no eye could melt the thatch of that rich ice,

      ears drummed accessories of black wind.

      But then there were the pears, he said,

      the pears and the blue, sea-washed glass. Shall you hear this too?

      His voice

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