Poem-A-Day 2019: Martin Elster

At the start of this month, I was posting these Poems-A-Day in the evenings because my days were so busy with school/work that evening was the only time I could sit down and write these blog posts. And now, some days (like Monday through Friday) that’s still true.

But I’ve also found that I genuinely prefer doing these posts in the evenings, and so maybe that will continue. I like settling down after the rest of the household has settled down (enough, anyway) and just resting with these poems, unhurried, reveling in the noble fiction that this is the only thing I have left to do before bedtime.

I earnestly look forward to the time in my life when that noble fiction might be true.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep settling into a poem each evening and sharing it with you.

That quietness, that take-a-breath-and-relax-for-a-moment feeling, is the same kind of settling in I feel when I read this wonderful poem, filled with music, by Martin Elster.

The Pigeons

Close by the bridge, they javelin

the frosty blue. Flashing, fading,

dipping, climbing, as if to win

the Bird Olympics, emulating

their wild forebears, forever together,

bonded by the sturdy tether

of kinship. The townsfolk dare not bustle

about in gales. They’re all shut in

like rabbits in their huts. The rustle

of remnant leaves and twigs is a thin

and bony xylophone. The flocking

aces wheel round and round the walking

man on the bridge, who watches each bird

click with the cloud in euphoric flight.

Strolling alone, for a moment cured

of the whiteness under the frigid light

of sunset, he can’t help but stare

as spirits soar and fade and flare.

***

Martin Elster is a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared

in numerous journals, including Autumn Sky, Better Than Starbucks, Cahoodaloodaling, Poetry Quaterly, The Flea, The Road Not Taken, and in various anthologies, includingTaking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 and 2015 Rhysling Anthologies, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, Poems for a Liminal Age, and the Potcake Chapbooks. Honors include co-winner of Rhymezone’s 2016 poetry contest, winner of the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014, third place in the SFPA’s 2015 poetry contest, and three Pushcart nominations.