The Paddock Review

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

               after William Carlos Williams and Bruegel’s painting by that name

 

Most days I would tell you I feel like the peasant 

scratching his ass at the bottom of Bruegel’s painting,

humming perhaps,                                                                                                       

perhaps thinking of the apple in his pocket.

 

But once I felt as Bruegel must have—

that attention must be paid.  

It was the day in March my first parent died, 

the day my father died.

 

Rushing across the street to the assisted living,

cell phone in hand, spreading my news, 

unreality increasing with each retelling,

an ordinary, faceless day turned singular.

 

Unconcerned, the children and nannies in the park

played around the fountain, workers from nearby offices

carelessly tossed away their sandwich wrappings.  

Daffodils elbowed their way hopefully through the thawing earth.

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Watching from the Bleachers (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/watching-from-the-bleachers-by-eileen-ivey-sirota/

….

Watching from the Bleachers draws us into engagement with the world in all its brokenness and beauty. Eileen Ivey Sirota‘s poems traverse the spectrum from the personal to the political — from the loving ambivalence between a cognitively impaired mother and her adult daughter to outraged examinations of racism, othering and indifference.  In the poem “In Which I Interrogate My Frequent Response” the author’s own privilege becomes the object of her sharp gaze.  Covid and its time-distorting effects are a frequent backdrop to this work.  The poems “Master Class” and “Advice to a Freshman” invite whimsical comparisons between the mating behavior of cicadas and college students. The inevitable losses of aging are captured elegiacally but without sentimentality.  The broad sweep of these poems is held together by a unique sensibility that combines wit, wonder, outrage and, ultimately, hope.

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a psychotherapist, poet, and potter.  Her poems have appeared in Calyx, District Lines, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Voices: Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, NewVerseNews, Ekphrastic Review, Lighten Up Online and elsewhere.  Her first chapbook, Out of Order, was published by Finishing Line Press.  Having been raised in a family of political junkies and activists in the Washington DC area, political and cultural issues infuse her poetry.  She lives in Bethesda, Maryland where she alternates between sputtering outrage and gob smacked wonder. Watching from the Bleachers unites these two tendencies.