Cumaná Holds On

                               White elephants walk in the sands long lost.
                               Hollow the salty beach and rivers sweet,
                               as efforts lost reveal their truly cost.
                               The fishermen and peasants miss the wheat.

                               Hope starves the poor and fattens statesmen’s pigs;
                               meagre, the pelican withers along
                               with sacred fish of joy and windy swigs
                               of flutes that play our Cumaná sad song.

                               The bitter psalms which praise absent messiahs,
                               which hide in waves of laughs, in seamen drunk,
                               should not turn us into shoeless pariahs—
                               though many mouths do feed amidst the junk?

                               The birds once plenty ate and met skies high
                               now seem to meet the foul hour to die.

The Shakespearean or English sonnet was not as popular as the Petrarchan sonnet in the XVI century, when William Shakespeare composed at least 154 (among which only three did not follow the typical structure: Sonnet 99, containing an extra line; Sonnet 126, missing two lines; and Sonnet 145’s meter being iambic tetrameter).

As you will see—or as you probably know already—an English sonnet is a fourteen-line poem divided into three four-line stanzas and a couplet (two rhymed lines); its rhyme scheme goes abab cdcd efef gg, and it is composed in iambic pentameter (five metrical feet per line, which sound ta-TA).

Traditionally, an English sonnet discusses a topic along its body. The topic, which can be a problem or just a theme, is stated in the first twelve lines, whereas the final couplet presents the reader with the conclusion, answer or solution.

Cumaná Holds On is a Shakespearean sonnet I composed to humbly honor my hometown, which, as you may have guessed already is Cumaná. Some days ago, I wrote a brief description of a day in my city and what a friend had told me about our town, for Hive account@jayna’s 50-Word Challenge (now a weekly contest, here) on Steemit:

This city, like the pelicans in the pictures (which inspired this poem), was expected to feed from its riches and succeed. However, like those pelicans, it stayed quiet and patient, waiting for leftovers, while all the fish were right there waiting for them to act in consequence.

Now that so many people have fled, and that so many others have learned to cope with hunger and indifference, there is the question left in the air: Shall the rest of the pelicans fly, too, or perish?