Amelia in The Roaring Forties
“All of us who fall are mythical: Elpenor and Icarus and I./Callow, fearless, mythical, misplaced, and mourned. Oh deeply mourned./But not unburied.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Ruminant With A View
By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
BRIDGE & TUNNEL New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—3/27/2014—
Amelia in The Roaring Forties
(For the passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.)
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of “Weekly Hubris,” considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition on Kindle. Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece, and America. Three other hats Boleman-Herring has at times worn are those of a Traditional Usui Reiki Master, an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher, a HuffPost columnist and, as “Bebe Herring,” a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans. (Her online Greek travel guide is still accessible at www.GreeceTraveler.com, and her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande a Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.) Boleman-Herring makes her home with the Rev. Robin White; jazz trumpeter Dean Pratt (leader of the eponymous Dean Pratt Big Band); Calliope; and Scout . . . in her beloved Up-Country South Carolina, the state James Louis Petigru opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” (Author Photos by Robin White. Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
9 Comments
Anita Sullivan
Oh, I love this! Right from the opening line to the end. What an elegy, what a thing to hold onto. Thank you!
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Thank you so much, Anita: this, from you, means so, so much to me. xoxoxoxo
jocelyn
Oh e, you have somehow managed to provide insight into what happened to those aboard flight 370 in a way that the news never did, never would, never could. The truth in this case is far better discovered via poetry than forensics or political analysis. Thank you for helping to make sense out of something that makes no sense at all. As always, you are wonderful.
S. Rose
I echo Anita’s sentiments. Strongly felt emotions that make the reader feel strongly.
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Dearest Jocelyn (and fellow Editor, Sanford), thank you. I never know–one never knows–if my very emotional response to an unfolding tragedy will be . . . just a little too much (one reason I clothed myself in Amelia Earhart’s psyche here). But I am profoundly appreciative that, in giving voice to all this, in some small way I gave us another, wider way of perceiving it. I. Just. Felt. So. Much. And I needed like hell to speak up for those lost souls, but not in a maudlin voice. Time will tell if I got it right. What matters most is that they not be forgotten in the rush of the morrow’s news.
Elisabeth Edmonston
A mystical tribute to fellow human travelers, unknown – yet, as we are, known. Sensitively, exquisitely written – rendering a painting in the reader’s mind. Thank you.
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Elisabeth Edmonston, thank you. What is far better, far, far better than being (as I am) compelled to write . . . is the honor, the joy, of being read, well and truly. Well and truly read. Thank you, and thank you for responding.
Ginger Berglund
I come back to read this again. To savor the salt, the preservative, the flying and falling. This poem is magic. The salve of lament. Elizabeth, many thanks for the goodness and depth of your work and gifts to us!
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Ginger, you and Scott and I are–perhaps primarily, when it comes to the written word–“lyricists.” Everything written MUST, for us, work . . . in breath. So I take your praise with honor and joy. I just wish Scott could compose for the other things I’m now writing; things that “scan.” See below:
“On First Looking into Kolbert’s ‘Sixth Extinction’”
by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring
Much have I mused upon this age of lead,
my carbon footprint mirrored by my pain,
a lobster in a gently warming pot of dread:
“I boil. Therefore, I am!” my soft refrain.
I boil–but slowly–with my ruddy head
above the water, just: I’m hopeful (if insane);
like all my brethren, I was calmly led
here by the hierarchy of greed and gain . . .
. . . till I heard Kolbert chanting to awake the dead,
as though, beneath the wave, there must remain
breath, will, or agency to halt the spread
of our extinction (self-inflicted, vain).
We’ll bleed until we boil in what we’ve bled:
silent, beached, on Armageddon’s plain.