Category: Life

In keeping with my “Whale Theme” this week, I found this piece from September 2022, while I was selecting poems for my up-coming book “Until Eyes Hear Sound”

In those ignorant bad old days
Who would have wanted to be a whale?
Who threw that harpoon into my back?




Whales Cry Too (a Mariannet*)

I

Hear them cry

…..When horrific harpoons pierce their hides

…..My heart bleeds from inside

……….Seeing whales so cruelly maimed




The name “Mariannet” was recently ‘coined’ by Paul (of Paul’s Poetry Playground)
>> [ Invented Poetry Forms – The Mariannet – Paul’s Poetry Playground ] for the previously unnamed poetic form that the poet Marianne Moore created to write her classic poem “The Fish” first published in 1918. The form was invented over a hundred years ago and is relatively unknown to most poets.
The mariannet is an isosyllabic rhyming poem, consisting of one or more five-line stanzas (quintains) with one syllable in the first line, three in the second, nine in the third, six in the fourth, and eight in the fifth and final line. The first two lines rhyme with each other, and so does the third and fourth, but the fifth is nonrhyming and does not rhyme with any other lines. Thus its rhyme scheme can be expressed as aabbx for each individual quintain (with x representing the nonrhyming line). In Moore’s original formatting of the form, the third and fourth lines were indented five spaces and the fifth ten spaces.
Below, I have attached Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish”, and below is a poignat Lisa Hannigan’s music/video.

“The Fish” – by Marianne Moore

wade
through black jade.
     Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
     adjusting the ash-heaps;
          opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
     The barnacles which encrust the side
     of the wave, cannot hide
          there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
     glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
     into the crevices—
          in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
     of bodies. The water drives a wedge
     of iron through the iron edge
          of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
     bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
     lilies, and submarine
          toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
     marks of abuse are present on this
     defiant edifice—
          all the physical features of

ac-
cident—lack
     of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
     hatchet strokes, these things stand
          out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
     evidence has proved that it can live
     on what can not revive
          its youth. The sea grows old in it.

—Marianne Moore




Ivor Steven © June 2023