unrelated comments of a happy nature

Now Playing: The Village soundtrack by James Newton Howard. Track 2.

Good spring music--I always think of the Fishers' house (before the renovations), the pale moon on a cloudy night, and damp early spring mornings over still-bare trees when I listen to this music.

The magnolias in the courtyard are blooming! The saucer magnolia trees are slowly becoming great glorious towers of deep burgundy flowers, and the star magnolias are decked with little white-veined-purple flowers that give off a thin, sweet smell.

Thank you all for your e-mails. I posted that comment at the end of my post awhile ago, and then a bunch of people sent e-mails (which was wonderful)--and then I got hit by a massive pile of schoolwork, so I haven't been able to reply to most of them. Please forgive me!

Petr and Shadow, your comments about the poems in this last post were quite right. The first one does deal with the way death affects not only people but the art they make.

So here's another poem, a bit more hopeful. The myth of Persephone, a Greek goddess, is that she was the daughter of the goddess of spring, and was captured by Hades, the king of Death. If she had managed to escape from his kingdom without eating or drinking anything from it, she would have been free, but she ate the seed of a pomegranate (or an apple, if you want Biblical overtones). Because she stumbled and ate the fruit, she was doomed to live half her life with Hades and half her life on earth with her mother. So when Persephone comes back from Death, we have spring and summer, and when she returns to Death, we have autumn and winter. I decided to rework the legend a bit, and give some hope for her release from this endless cycle....

Persephone Revisited
From Adagio con moto, Sonata in E minor for flute, cello, and harpsichord, by J.S. Bach

I watch the leaves fall on the rainy wind.
My land is mourning me, for in my death
Dies summer’s loveliness, sun’s labors lost.
Like candles for a wedding blown to smoke
The wind blows my warm year away. My art,
The strophes of the sky, the polished hills,
The jeweled gardens like embellished scrolls,
Are torn and scattered, blown to withered shreds.
The living towers of the trees turn black,
Flat figures on a brittle vase, the red
Of summer’s sunset fired to fragile clay
That crumbles, towers crushed to silver dust.
My own lips blow the summer’s candles out,
Myself destroying work that weeps with me.
Cursed by myself into the dark I go—
My weakness dooms both me and all I make.
Yet as the summer sets, the sweet rain falls—
These lips that blew their candles out still breathe,
Kept warm by the sweet kiss of life’s bright lord—
My poetries are safe between his hands,
The furling fields stored deep in fertile Word,
Where they shall sleep and then burst forth to grow
Called by this rain, his promise of a spring
When I shall make in him without a fall.