Emily Holmes Coleman - Poem (1927)

Forgotten Poems #13

 
love of the silent twilight
                      the benediction
                   that is in your hands

moving waters of tenderness
on the burning glitter of my madness

                              quiet hands
asylum for my bewilderment
     when phantoms of other worlds seek after me
peace to my spent spirit

    come to me when the day is sleeping
    still my conflict with your aloofness
                 and I shall be a burst of star-dust
                         to rend the weary curtain
                                            of your monotony
 

Emily Holmes Coleman (1899-1974)
P: Transition (1927); novels, articles, etc.

Born in California; attended Wellesley College. Moved to Paris in 1926; began publishing poetry in Transition, and writing a novel—The Shutter of Snow (1930)—based on her experiences of being institutionalised. Society editor and staff-writer for the Paris Tribune, and at one time secretary to anarchist writer and political-activist Emma Goldman.

Goldman, in Living My Life (1931), recalls: “I started for Saint-Tropez, a picturesque fisher nest in the south of France, in company of Emily Holmes Coleman, who was to act as my secretary. Demi, as she is familiarly called, was a wild wood-sprite with a volcanic temper. But she was also the tenderest of beings, without any guile or rancour. She was essentially the poet, highly imaginative and sensitive. My world of ideas was foreign to her, natural rebel and anarchist though she was. We clashed furiously, often to the point of wishing each other in Saint-Tropez Bay. But it was nothing compared to her charm, her profound interest in my work, and her fine understanding for my inner conflicts.”

“Writing had never come easy to me, and the work at hand did not mean merely writing. It meant reliving my long-forgotten past, the resurrection of memories I did not wish to dig out from the deeps of my consciousness. It meant doubts in my creative ability, depression, and disheartenings. All through that period Demi held out bravely and by her faith and encouragement proved the comfort and inspiration of the first year of my struggle.”

The use of blank space in the composition: the “page” comes to life, energising the words. The arresting depths of expression. The use of fragmentation, each stanza entirely capable of standing-alone as a complete poem in its own right. The haiku-like opening tercet;

 
      love of the silent twilight—
           the benediction
               that is in your hands
 

The rhymed-couplet;

 
           moving waters of tenderness
      on the burning glitter of my madness
 

The quatrain;

 
           quiet hands
      asylum for my bewilderment
      when phantoms of other worlds seek after me
      peace to my spent spirit
 

And the cinquain;

 
      come to me when the day is sleeping
      still my conflict with your aloofness
      and I shall be a burst of star-dust
      to rend the weary curtain
           of your monotony
 

Due to Coleman’s play on the structure of growth, gradually building the stanza lengths, there is no end-stop, but a suggestion instead: for the reader to “become poet” and continue the pattern . . .

 
              —: After Emily Coleman Holmes :—
                               by Dick Whyte

                   envoi:
      wind is the wind is the wind
      and the night is alive
      as any of us
      joyously singing
      in a language so old
      only the earth understands
  

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More poems about twilight . . .