RONDA WICKS ELLER

14. Shoreline Rush to Placid Lake

Synopsis: This piece was inspired when a friend of Ronda's posed the question of why he always sought love in wrong places and ignored the good and friendly faces. Not overly intricate in its imagery, the poem offers a smooth, illustrative allegory of a distant man, married, looking at a woman he perceives as beautiful and determines to remember her vision, to take home. He tucks it beneath his pillow, making her an object of his dreams and bedroom fantasy. She is a "sacred relic" to him because she is untouchable, out-of-bounds, like a Madonna.

Lyric: 6 quatrains with a predominantly ABBACDDE rhyme scheme.

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15. Temporal Things

Synopsis: This poem muses over the repulsion and attraction of transient things; romances and love emotions, magic spells, civilizations, religions, the physical body... It moves from a position of shunning them to dreaming over them as the poet acknowledges their role in the larger scope of this reality. It is another way of recognizing the sum as being no greater than the whole of its parts and how even things/events that are not preferable (in a narrower vision) have cause for acceptance. Irony: the poet who shuns the likes of ones who "would mortal and immortal wed" essentially comes to wed them together by the end of the poem.

Lyric: 4 sextets in a predominantly ABBCCA scheme.

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16. On Heavenly Stairs

Synopsis: A funeral poem illustrating the transition between one life and the next; death is assumed although purposefully evaded to present the concept of death as an illusion and the continuance of the soul. "Voices that hum like a gentle wind" infer a faint calling from entities in another dimension of reality as the poem begins and forms the poet's conclusion as the soul adopts its own "voice that hums like the gentle wind" and joins them. This poem was written August 20, 2005, three days after Ronda's late, estranged husband's death. It was written on his birthday.

Lyric: The poem has a smooth rhythmic flow and cadence but no specific rhyme scheme - befitting the nature of a spirit leaving this world behind as it seeks a new course of direction; the transition is smooth, not tragic, and almost mystical or songlike in quality.

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17. Who, but They?

Synopsis: A 'song' of accolades from the immortal human spirit toward nature, the cosmos and its source of being. There is a kinship to natural elements. It makes a statement of its own anonymity to other spiritual peers who have not attained a level of knowing and remembering from one life to the next, in order to understand their true immortal natures. Only those who "plant and reap immortals in each season's sleep" infers the existence of higher evolved souls who oversee the events of earthly physical being.

Imagery: "emerald morn" - the dawning of a new day in Ireland "the emerald isle" hearkens a Celtic influence that reinforces the involvement and kinship to natural elements while suggesting the progression toward a peaceful co-existence that has, so far, been a cause of struggle.

Rhyme: 2 octets, the first with cadence but variable scheme, the second with rhyming couplets.

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18. His Smiling Transformation

Synopsis: Inspired by Yeats' poem "His Phoenix" (a poem in which Yeats remembers Maud Gonne as a phoenix in his youth and refuses to compare her to other women, of whom he says "let them have their day"). A large amount of Yeats romantic literature is the result of him feeling that he never really achieved "his day" with Maud Gonne although they had a strong spiritual affinity to one another. On this premise, Ronda has extended the Willie / Maud romance to bring them beyond physical incarnations to a spiritual incarnation that gives them "their day". Connecting imagery from Yeats' poem to this one (His Smiling Transformation): "who is my beauty's equal, though that my heart denies, and that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun..." and "I knew a phoenix in my youth so let them have their day".

Lyric: 2 octets followed by a quatrain. The octets have an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, the quatrain is ABAB.

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19. The Dark Night's Chill

Synopsis: Written as if from the viewpoint of Wm. Butler Yeats as he looks back at a woman from a previous lifetime, this poem was inspired by Yeats' own poem "An Image From a Past Life". The setting for Dark Night's Chill is Yeats' tower at Thoor Ballylee. He muses over his attraction to her and is then jarred back to the present by an owl's hooting - where he is faced with the reality that he doesn't know WHO she is coming back as in this lifetime... nor does his poet's pen (his quill). There is a play in this piece based on the study of Yeats' lifelong attraction / obsession with Maud Gonne, who said herself that if she did not remain distant from him then he would have no fodder for his poetry. In The Dark Night's Chill, Yeats finds even more fodder because she is now more distant than ever (another lifetime) and he has remembered that he wants to rediscover her. The poem raises a question of attractions being subject to predestination from one life to the next. It provides a framework for contemplating the 'soul mate' concept.

Lyric: 3 octets with a predominantly ABABCDCD rhyme scheme.

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20. Whale Songs in the Aurora Borealis

Synopsis: In "Whale Songs...", the title poem of the chapbook, a spirit looks at its past incarnations and the 'masks' it wore within each framework "pretending to be someone else, pretending to be myself" and then it assumes the role of being its own judge. To the spirit, all of these masks are like a long, eerie, somewhat lonesome sounding whale song that it doesn't understand. The spirit sees itself as an incomplete god: "Jupiter calling for his bride" (Jupiter being the Roman equivalent of the Greek mythological god Zeus) and in a sudden switch of culture (as would be expected of a spirit that has absorbed both) the spirit continues the thought through Greek mythology in recognizing that Jupiter (Zeus) is seeking his bride (Juno / Hera) in order to procreate his son Hermes (the fast, flighted god who carries a magic wand and leads the dead to the underworld). The spirit desires some Hermetic revelation. Subsequently, it looks outside of its own being and sees other spirits who appear to have their own places in the cosmic scheme of things - they are Juno's beautiful borealic changes (Juno being the protector of those who are married, particularly women) and they seem to be 'complete'. It wishes to be like them, at peace and unaware of its own being, but it begins to express itself to them instead: "I wore Pan and with pipe in hand" - a different son and a capable musician. In commanding the attention of the aurora borealis spirits, it then understands its true cosmic role to be just that - the poetic and musical self-expression. Finally, through this understanding, the spirit sees the reason for each of its previous masks in making it what it has become and it meets / absorbs the essence of that very same whale song with peace! The entire poem is about the soul's journey toward self-realization and one-ness with the cosmos.

Free verse.