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    Placate The Jaws
    Placate The Jaws
    Placate The Jaws
    Ebook98 pages42 minutes

    Placate The Jaws

    By Elizabeth Elliott

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    About this ebook

    Life Goes On Even When "Shadowed By War"
    The violence to a mother and her kite-flying son in Placate The Jaws, the plea for hope beyond war in To The Children Of Those Who Hate Us, and the poignant sight of a young man walking along the highway in Outside Postnet, are three efforts of a non-combatant poet to make war real for all the lucky ones who live their lives outside the zones of war.
    Four of the fifty-six short poems in Elliott's fourth book of poems are songs that she wishes she could set to music: Just A Detour, Dancing In The Valley Of The Dolls, Indium Blues, and All In White Linen. There is also a longer poem about death, Before You Close The Lid, and a poem that scolds cut flowers for feeling sorry for themselves, In Death Be Proud. The ambition of a parrot, a soliloquy by a lobster, a child therapist with a problem of rabbits, and the early days of a dysfunctional family, Children and Parents are all poems about normal life that never stops. But all these various scenes exist in a world where war and violence are becoming the new normal and we must protect ourselves from not caring about what war does to children and families, what war has done to returning soldiers. This section, "Shadowed by War," is surrounded by songs and life lived in a lucky place like America.
    Elizabeth'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
    ISBN9780986297052
    Placate The Jaws
    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

      Placate The Jaws - Elizabeth Elliott

      Placate The Jaws

      POEMS

      ***

      By Elizabeth Elliott

      www.elizabethelliottpoetry.com

      Published by Winter Press LLC

      www.winterpresspublishing.com

      For my four children who are in the thick of it

      Elizabeth,Winthrop,Amanda,Alexander

      and

      my eight grandchildren just getting a taste of it

      Page,Laine,Henry,Lucy

      Flynn,Charlie,George,Sally

      Distributed by Smashwords

      Discover these other titles by Elizabeth Elliott:

      Burn All Night (1998)

      Winter ferry(2008)

      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 978-0-9862970-5-2 (Epub)

      Cover painting by Bayard Hollins

      Cover Design by Kat Moran

      Part I

      Part I

      Bramble Pulling

      for a clearer of brush

      He's been at it now three days,

      shedding the slicker,

      hooking the clippers on a branch

      while he leans

      to lift the brush and walk,

      blind, to add it to the pile.

      When he comes in at six he will ache

      the way a road must ache

      after it’s been broken up,

      ripped,graveled

      and rolled. But he can see

      exactly now, just where the two paths

      will soon connect. The brush

      and brambles have become a game,

      to be considered, to be played

      with delicate finesse,

      instead of the leap into a

      wilderness they seemed at first.

      *   *   *

      He’d forgotten so much when he began. How long things take, for instance.

      Because he can see the clear necessity of connecting

      these two paths

      to make a circle from the house, expose a hemlock, a thrust of rock,

      but this does not convince the brambles

      to come easily to his hand.

      But wilderness gives way to method.

      Method even makes him blind to why he clears.

      For a while his only pleasure

      lay in this, the clearing.

      He forgot the hemlock,

      the prow of rock, the paths.

      Enough to learn to stack up brush

      so it would stay intact when carried

      to the pile, to learn

      to pick it up before it got so big he’d break his back,

      to learn to clip off twigs,

      the bushy heads of shrubs,

      and leave the trunks for kindling,

      to learn not to try to pull up shrubs

      but cut them down,

      that really, only brambles pull.

      *   *   *

      This is the big thing, learning the character of brambles,

      the way they bow down before him,

      their arched backs

      between him and their stems.

      so he has to tackle stems before he grasps the stalks.

      The stalk to grasp is the smallest one.

      It’s green and has the closest hold

      upon the plant. The others

      may break off but the youngest leads him to the roots. Then sometimes,

      if there’s a rock beneath, the root lies shallow

      and runs up out of the humus

      the way a basting thread will run up out of a hem.

      The best is when it runs on to its end,

      finally sliding clean and smooth

      out of the last tunnel of earth,

      leaving no way to trace

      its history on another spring.

      Usually though, the root breaks off

      and he knows he's said so long

      and not goodbye.

      *   *   *

      Of course it’s easy to see the brambles,

      they spike the air and lean to catch

      his

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