Inspirations and Reflections

This poem came to mind on a late night bicycle commute towards the end of October.  I was returning home after an stop to eat and read following a day of packing emergency parachutes for pilots and reserve parachutes for skydivers.  While in the parking lot donning rain gear, reflective items and turning my lights and flashers on I first heard the sound of large wings and then the calls of scores of Canada geese from all across the northern horizon.  I paused for quite a while to listen and search even though it was a foggy, cold night with the temperatures in the upper 30s.

Midnight Migration

Photo by Frank Starmer, CC-BY-NC-SA

Haunting calls out of clouded darkness vie,
Echoed both left and right,
Choruses from the northern sky.

Visible in o'er cast winter's night,
Chevrons forming, shifting, reforming;
Airborne ghosts gliding in and out of sight.

Pinions in counterpoint sigh,
Heard with breath held light.
Haunting calls out of cloudy darkness vie.

The poem started out as five lines of free verse, no meter or rhyme.  That may well have been the better version.  The trouble is that four years of literature in a Catholic, all male, high school back in the seventies would not let me leave it without rhyme and meter.  Blame Mr. Joe Baker at Christian Brothers HS in Memphis.


In fact this is the first poem I have written since an assignment from him in sophomore English literature.  We were studying Shakespeare's poetry and he assigned us the task of composing a sonnet.  He said he expected that we would use the English (Shakespearean) form because it was the easiest and he thought the Italian (Petrarchan) would be beyond us, even though we were in his Honor's class.  I viewed this as a challenge.  Well, I completed the assignment and handed it in on time.  (There are actually more than the two forms which he taught us, but I didn't know it at the time.)

I was very stunned when I received it back a week later with a D for a grade.  In his written comments Mr. Baker stated that the rhyming pattern was completely wrong and his only reasons for not giving me an F were that my poem had the correct number of lines (14) and was mostly in iambic pentameter.  Afterwards I pointed out to him that my sonnet was a precise example of the Italian form he said was too difficult for us. 

I do wish I still had a copy of it.  The first thirteen lines were of misty mornings in the forest with the sun coming through the fall foliage.  I wrote of the awakening day, hearing the gurgling of a nearby stream and the antics of squirrels leaping from limb to limb.  The volta of my sonnet did not come until the final line.  This 'turn' or 'shift' usually comes in line 9 in the Italian form, leaving the poet adequate time for his resolution of the two ideas.  Supposedly it is more difficult to carry off a proper volta in only the final line.

Opportunities to become more than we currently are come in many forms.  Sometimes others set the challenges which lead us to rise above where we are.  A school assignment such as writing a poem or short story could be a turning point.  Even though we may not believe it at the time, there are many people out there wanting us to be our best: parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, etc.  However, not all external sources of these "challenges" are there for the purpose of making you a better person.  Not everything thrown at us by life, society, or our culture is fair.  Some challenges must be overcome just to stay alive.

We may set even greater challenges for ourselves; such as my, in a trivial way, using the Italian form for my sonnet.  Really great in my mind are those overcoming physical and mental obstacles.  I had an uncle severely injured in a automobile accident caused by a drunken driver.  The doctors told him he would never walk again.  He was not walking when he left the hospital almost a year later, but he was doing wheelies down the hallways in his wheelchair.  It was only another year or so before he had discarded his crutches and was walking with a cane and braces. 

It is not always bragging to tell others of your accomplishments and abilities.  It would be difficult to go far in a job interview without a little blowing of your own horn. Your achievements may be overlooked by others, this is especially true if you do not blend in with the crowd.  You do not need to be out of the normal limits to be overlooked, just outside of the observers expectations.

By the way, Mr. Baker did raise my grade.  I believe I recall getting a B on the sonnet.  Either my volta on the final line did not measure up or he just did not like my shift of perspectives.  As a young teenager I would spend time at my grandmother's following the streams into the forest, observing the wildlife, exploring, and observing the flora.  At times my grandmother and I would be in the forest together, but a little apart.  It is very probable that Mr. Baker did not like the volta in my sonnet because it concluded with me shooting the squirrel for our supper.  (A fact probably upsetting to many of you, even more so once you learn I spent most of my adult life as a veterinarian, or in school to become one.  A goal I set for myself two years before writing that sonnet.)