Requiem of Juliet

He wears a mask, O swear I am a saint.

He, a pilgrim, and now his sin erased.

Stolen kiss, he would be absolved in faith,

and though unmoving, I would not be faint.

For at this grand feast hall of my parents,

there is no masked dance except noble dance

of Capulets and their guests, in one glance

I could assess their numerous talents.

I stand in a room no Montague would dare

enter, for this long-standing feud would not

end, stirs up dissention in Verona.

I dance, whirl, coming close enough to stare

at Paris—the one I blindly could not

marry.  I would rather have a love knot.

 

I am only thirteen, and though naïve,

I have kissed the one I love, now knowing

love eternally—in one boat rowing,

behind a pillar, mysterious, brave.

No offer, except that sin be removed

from my dull lips: I kiss you once again.

But who might you be in this vaulted space?

I, closing my eyes, that heaven be moved,

that I would not be anarchy-tainted,

but if only to know your name; my nurse

shall tell me what I ask, I now implore.

For I am but a nightingale, sainted,

winnowing the dark on the Holm oak’s purse,

its wealth, the wealth of Verona’s waxed floor.

 

Romeo in black mask, my enemy,

a Montague no less, nurse enunciates,

and yet our flame-held love hallucinates

from enmity to righteous purity.

This kind of reverence, throated passion,

has been my crime, for I am now outcast,

tiptoeing in the silence that you fast

without me, hunger-stricken in fashion.

Left in noxious blasphemy, I feel sea

on stone against religion’s enamelled

calling—its staid followers to renounce

idolatry: Romeo has seen me

and all his poignant affection channeled,

and yet this one love I could not announce.

 

That night, I stepped on the stone balcony;

the nightingales were chanting. Then the same

wept—I wished for him to renounce his name:

in one bold space, his voice commanded me—

“Juliet, it is I, your Romeo.”

And in his hand—a silver rose, his hair,

as if it acquiesced by moonlight’s air,

his hand, flailing for my aquiline nose.

I watched him in the garden under night:

I seethe lone, from stately Capulet’s house,

that I should be forced to marry Paris,

he with whom I have no blinded delight—

it is the darker Romeo I love,

it is the mysterious force of fate.

 

With chestnut mane tumbling down my shoulders,

and my white wool apron tucked away, get

the friar with myrtle in his basket

to marry us, while rejecting of verse,

as villains in crime, we would, in secret,

be wed. We would carry thorned-blood roses,

as briny ocean marries rock, lap shore,

and lily-youthful vows we’d not regret.

It was on his way home that my husband

encountered a street fight and battled kin,

and when his noble friend was stabbed to death,

my cousin’s blood red-flowed into the sand.

O majesty Verona, my cousin

was dear to me, my tears, twined laurel wreath.

 

Under a spray of juniper berries,

I am outlined against the star-crossed night,

while the Montagues and the Capulets fight

in the street as ardent adversaries.

Raising words as violent rapiers, swords

subtle; while only a youth, I perceive

that I may use a word swiftly, conceive

of a future to work deftly towards.

What is this lark singing sweetly I hear?

What song could bend with morning to entice?

To speak a word gives it meaning in jest;

could the fates be re-written by my care?

The quill beneath my hand was cool as ice

to mother: I would not marry Paris.

 

O sorrowful Verona, my husband

climbed a cloth ladder to my bedroom while

banished from you for murder: cousin’s bile

mixed with the dust of russet boot-shaped land.

We embraced until morn and when the last

nightingale sang, he fled over the ledge

of the balcony. We gave solemn pledge

to meet again, like statues in gold cast.

Morning I was to wed Paris, they found

me dead, as by the friar’s herbal aid

I did drink tincture. I feigned death, but stealth—

Romeo heard, and rushed to my sealed tomb.

There he drank an apothecary’s made

poison’s death; I awoke—then stabbed myself.

Emily Isaacson

  

All photos used by permission.

https://armstreet.com/

Requiem of Cinderella

In a coal corner of the kitchen bare,

Violet with blond locks sweeps the fireplace,

dusted with old wasp wings, she weeps, disgraced;

a Cinderella, broom beneath the stair.

She lives in the attic of this grand house,

sleeping on iron bed, banished above,

while once she was her father’s winging dove—

now attended to by a graying mouse.

While she scurries for her stepsisters sleeves,

her head in dreams, she sings the brightest note,

making mouse-errand trips to a moss knoll,

while she shines crystal fluting and believes

a prince she met in a field one day spoke,

inviting supple women to a ball.

 

Though her voice, remedy from beech and chaste,

grew Black Hambourg vine up the grey stone wall,

childhood whispering to her china doll,

a father’s princess of unbroken lace.

She as a maiden tethered the gold horse

in the pasture with the sun for rose lamp

setting overhead, she rode from her camp

of hundred-year-old mansion Le Gall Gorse,

where evil stepmother next made her home

with her two daughters, wild moor hills of France

subduing Violet ’cross Finistère

to scrub the mansion floors with castile soap.

Her face smudged with soot, Cinderella sang

a dirge to the clock’s ticking minister.

Wood violet, dear child grown to woman,

knelt, her wisps of rough long blond hair tied back,

nuanced modesty on wrought iron stand,

her purple nosegay resting to chasten

her to repetitive token paintbrush,

she imbued the long strokes, watercolour:

fiery centre, water-purple, flower

pot—on rippling landscape escaping lush.

Armorica peninsula, clean drawn,

a shuttered house close to the lashing sea

opened its arms then, a hundred-years-old—

with steady beech a shelter, tolerant

godmother of old, whose ideas—tea,

brewed black tannins in glass, wizened and cold.

 

She made a thousand stitches, quilt patterns

growing and dispensing with coming night,

unlike the tormented filtered daylight

streams, shafted through the ancient window, yearns

for child, rests on eight pointed star, quarter

square, patchwork, snowball, or four patch quilt block.

While she is only their servant, a knock:

a demanding order from stepmother.

Violet has garden robins for friends,

as sweet as she is enduring and kind,

she greets each red breast—named, welcomes them in

her apron, to perch on the porch, the depths,

shadows in the yard broken by wind chimes,

the long-forgotten music wears not thin. 

 

English violet on French soil, your feet

have travelled over the moors, like your eyes

adore cairns left as monuments, raised ties

to the past, remembrance in tumuli,

like a shrine of stones that weeps in colour

of the earthen Noires Mountains in the south,

towering over Muscadet’s rough cloth,

greenly with cut crystal’s wine-like savour.

Aroma of the sea’s sapidity,

you are salt-crashing to sand, cresting white,

it breathes from flecked clam shells in rocky coves

before formations, the ocean crafting

of millennia-wayfaring granite

in its own way, as a religion’s trove.

 

This fertile ground begat the Chardonnay

in your father’s cupboard, variety

of clusters on the vine, a toast lady-

like, delicate vineyard velvet-leaf’s day.

The violet, when overshadowed, hides

not far down the lane, under hedgerows, near

a row of mice, a pumpkin, makes the tears

of the scullery maid’s coal face, crying. 

She sings a low tune, calls out, then the day

of days, when in godmother-drafted dress,

meets the prince again at the castle ball.

She is a lavender-hued beauty stayed,

bedecked with crystal necklace at her crest

of throat, the clear gems in a dance with all.

 

Her dainty figure left her glass slipper,

after waltzing, just bent, a dance-flower

petal-purple under sunset’s power,

cream sash imbuing eyes of cornflower

amid elegant feet’s primal chaos

on the parquet floors, dancing in their blooms,

hooves and carriages en route to their tombs,

the prince, her shoe in hand, would find her lot

then, as purple emperor butterfly:

kneels to put it on her foot, then rises,

so the white bands and the orange-dot-hindwings,

blue-black then crease the air like quiet cries

of liberty. All around violets,

in glittering castle where her veil reigns.

Emily Isaacson

All photos used by permission.

https://armstreet.com/

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May: Requiem of the Wild Rose

My blossomed summer approaches in June.

My giantess hands hold the wild rose bush,

as it plumbs the live earth with its tap root,

what I have planted no swine will uproot.

Here velvet petals fall about, supine,

as I collect them in my silken bowl,

my face, shadowed, by navy linen cowl,

the word-sketched lace of lost Europe sublime.

The potpourri of nations gathered here

beneath my careful hands—seeds, wrinkled, dry,

petals on the day will, vacuous, shrink,

the audience obliged, their heads raise near,

to taste a smell so sweet, their heads bowed, cry:

at perfume on the brink, in rosa-pink.

 

Who is Rhonda? the populace might ask,

as my rose bushes divide the white sun,

as my broad shoulders held trowels like guns,

and garden muscle rippled at the task.

I had dark coarse hair like a horse’s mane,

and hands like a man’s, that dug in the earth:

this is my haven, lest you swallow first

the fruit of rose hips without noticing

who grew them there for your china teacup,

who first held the seedlings, and trimmed to thorn,

who in all right gathered the burr rose buds

in all their burgundy glory, starlets—

kicked at my resigned brow like newly born—

and diva-wide leaves curtseyed to no one.

 

It was no easy task not to be feared,

so I kept to myself in the garden

of wild roses, the play-land of pardon

where the pine tree’s imagined guilt is cleared.

Every plant has a purpose to the mind,

and kept in bowls, they resonate on dew,

they reverberate to heal and be new

bandages to the poor, renewal-kind.

These remedies, gentle, innocuous,

have glass droppers in apothecary,

with labels in brown, line the referenced shelves.

I am well equipped, for the sensitive:

bottle by bottle, steeped in dark brandy,

every book about these valued plants sells.

 

To write each word in scrawl, I am resigned;

I bow my head in sacred solitude.

Hands reach out as if blind, similitude

to those in the dark and shackled, confined.

I shall be their pale hands and fruitless feet:

medicine, Socrates in a black slug

re-creates their hard skulls from languid mud,

ravishing the frozen heart’s rhythmic beat.

Here in this dirt, I am forever plant

of greenest, verdant, rain-soaked, flow’ring park:

there is a branch reaching out, magenta

on drying spruce where now I languish, rant,

wailing as wild rose, petals fall to bark

in falling dark, covering stigmata.

 

Rising harmonic line ascends as shrill

as woodwinds can raise the dead from their graves,

as heavenward the dusty lift their face,

their lost, wayward fuchsia mouths have their fill.

For every born child—fair with marked face—

at this burden, has hung their heads in shame,

resigned to what they carry as their fame,

and cowered before others in disgrace.

As adults, they go on, and did forget

the notions they, as children, entertained

in innocence at some brown misplaced mole.

Where hunch-backed crows cawed out at their regret;

beneath the witch-like trees, inside the rain,

honey-haired lads went on without a chore.

 

But I, Rhonda, lifted the rock water

to the pink rose tree on the scull-wood knoll,

poured from my Ethiopian-black bowl,

temple of apothecary fathers. 

Here there is only a taste of rose milk,

what is pressed and left from the dead teacher

who made the path through this tangled ether

modernity, shoes the doctor would fill.

Bach is veritable god, the creatures

cried in unison, no leaf, nor flower

unnoticed. All nature, his remedy,

and his clean, clinical, boyish features

crafted, yielding of his one shy power

to graft the wild-blown branch—calamity.

I, Rhonda, stand tall in last eve’s twilight.

I am genuinely liked by no one,

I am incongruous; the last bold thorn

of the wild rose, in early summer, fights

as a flock of geese adapts to the winds.

I remind my patrons with solemn truce

of calloused hand’s shaping nature’s rose-puce,

of how a strong woman never rescinds,

of an old lament—song from long ago:

not to be afraid of your own thorns, sharp

where they grow. Croon the antiquated runes,

for this is how the wild rose rampant sows,

this is her dedicated music, harp

that sings aloud; with her digits, she prunes.

 

Emily Isaacson

 

All photos used by permission.

https://armstreet.com/

Requiem of Astolat

In a grey tower by the window’s side,

Astolat, heavy stone beneath her feet,

feathered in the night, sheaves of yellow wheat,

flaccid over the hillsides, singing bide,

townspeople, toward happy, ringing stare

at the dark windows of mirrored Elaine,

at the rose petals, blood-red, falling plain

on the remnants of her red fragile hair,

where she combs like water, reddened tresses, 

where she winds her way accursed, alone,

whilst the mirror would crack a lovely woman:

skirts drag the floor of her linen dresses,

and her blue, the scent of the river foam;

underneath the laurels, she rested then.

 

Shrouds of a petal, nuanced in shadow,

she wafts slender; as young as she is old.

Upon the ramparts stretched like blackened mould

across stagnant old rock water shallows:

the fingers of the ancient world as sleet

as they were sunshine, the tulips, scarlet,

and the weavers barter on the market,

rumbling verse endowed upon the shod feet

of the villagers, and their wooden dance.

For the curse unnamed had turned them almost

stone, rendering arms dilapidated,

crumbling, creeping across the encampments

of all damp England and its lonely host.

She sees only the mirror’s reflection.

 

The visionary gift has resided

within the pangs of her ivory breast;

what she sees waxes poetic at best,

elm over bluebell in dell presided.

What she fears thunders in the howling night

beyond the castle’s rigid oaken door,

preys the broken mind to tiger-rent floor,

takes the remnants of joy in its jaws’ height.

There is little peace here within the walls.

There, flickering, the summer light’s taxing

call upon the hard heart to, softened, turn;

there, a hollow uttering down the halls,

of guttering candles, drenched in beeswax;

call upon beating wing to ceaseless, churn.

 

Each novice now will turn their hem-stitched backs,

and buds shut tight will weep as I did weep,

at the glory of this palatial-steep

shame of the womanhood, 'tis brittle lack.

For four and twenty years a girl is made,

and for a fine-brushed head, she glossy shone,

her talents lay in making him a home,

across a river he would gladly wade

for the love of her one candle, win her.

He would hold her spindle in the darkened

sun, and she would spin by the light of moons.

There was one autumn garment left on earth,

and its coated threads engulfed its spartan

beginnings, she threw it over a loon.

 

The magic of the underworld would see

in this act, a sheer immeasurable

moment of genius, for loons durable,

with a coat of metal became money.

The steel efficiency of provisions

made ascension to higher realms duty,

her forehead’s tiara decked in ruby,

in visiting different dimensions.

Yet even yet, he did not love this one,

in all her grey as graphite stone, untoward,

she in her illustrious way, desists,

from writing with her wand of carat gold

upon the castle door his name, behold,

and sinks into the moat, she yet resists.

 

The goblets have all spilled their wine in prayer,

the sunken table bowed with venison,

inklings of the crimson gown’s unison

with madness: one should have knelt, then wiser.

Icicles in a crown had made winter

solstice decorate convent lake and trees,

with unseeing eyes, she, unpardoned, sees

widened, unfailing beam of the lintel

over the snowy landscape of powder,

subduing her one grace to nameless art,

she is whitened in a wash unduly.

Holding power of the house over her,

making her unable to with him part:

she, in, out, breathes only scandalously.

 

The dark has hid her, as a cape-robed guide,

as she, in the boat’s stern, will carve her name,

to bear her beaten soul within its frame,

here now upon the calm-strewn river’s side.

Solemn enchantment at the lady fair,

for no other in all England, for love,

is sanctimonious as a pale dove,

with life escaped her last breath, lying there;

she is the pearl of Lancelot, his side

pierced of blood and water, cross-held shield, she

lies lifeless, cold and with lily-white hands,

has felt of still-born rigour, not his bride

but his perfect corpse, mingling water, free

and floats to Camelot of quiet lands.

Emily Isaacson

Photos used by permission www.armstreet.com

Dedicated to the memory of Ed Suderman

Debussy's Clair de Lune

 

I met you in the pale spring afternoon.

I met you on the veranda in March.

Your eyes spoke of small buds and the new lambs,

you brought me a copy of Tennyson.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

Your hands caressed my hands—all their detail,

as your whole life touched my too-broken life,

as daffodils shout their golden rims bright,

while the leather Daphne fragranced my dreams.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

I was diminutive and shy, solemn,

draped in a rocking chair in the sweeping

of terra cotta, morning across cloud,

from sunrise creeping over the mountain,

from the alabaster blossoms weeping,

stealing across the lawn like fingers proud.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

When, in my accent Cape Cod dress, I sit

on evening’s veranda, ivory moon,

a crescent, hangs before the flight of loons,

my soul, in lamb’s soft wool, knits lanolin.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

Iris garden, in quiet pen sketches,

snowdrops, undecorated. . . dreamy hues

kneel on the cobblestones, and worship you

like the early sun, dawn’s gentle stirrings.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

As milky salve, I collect lavender;

cluster by cluster, I peel hyacinth,

crushed within marble mortar with pestle,

for potpourri, with old rose petals, pearls

from a turtle dove. Rain, pattering, rinsed

lilacs, just in time for the tea kettle.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

Ironing doilies by my beeswax’s crest

of candlelight, cotton wick tight-woven.

The night is still-young and at peace, coven

of cottage-core unmarred  as a white dress.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

Ladened by metal sadiron, I pray,

I press on and on into the spring eve.

By the light of my one candle, I weave

the iron to the pianoforte.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

 

To Clair de Lune, there’s no distraction now,  

the quarter notes come in blackened whispers.

Melody rises and falls, in this town.

’Fore the day is over you have my vow,

while the small cat preens translucent whiskers,

you will see me in my cream wedding gown.

When you will have loved, then you will have lived.

Emily Isaacson

*This poem is not in a formal sonnet form, but has modified Italian sonnet rhyme schemes and sonnet quatrains with a repeting line.