Years ago, when I was at Rice, I had a roommate named Fred who was very musical — he played the piano and guitar and had a powerful but sweet tenor voice. One evening, he claimed to me that he could sing anything, absolutely anything. I challenged him and offered a textbook øn differential equations. He opened it, and immediately began to sing the text beautifully, turning phrases like: " the partial of y with respect to the partial of x" into lovely sounds.
I thought of Fred when I wrote the following song/poem. It is meant to be sung (or chanted) aloud.
PLAINSONG
Once, I sang,
And the people came,
And they smiled at me and said:
"Sing, sing some ore."
No more song.
My voice has lost its music,
And now the people are
Deaf, deaf to me.
I cannot hum.
Life has a hum
I cannot hear, or understand.
Noise, noise to me
I need song.
I must find a way
To rejoin that harmony
Lost, lost to me.
Old. Grown old.
Oh tell me, God
Why life must needs be linear?
Bend, bend a little.
I'll be a child!
A child can laugh, a child can cry
If I can cry, the I can
Sing, sing some more.
A blog about all the arts, including politics
"for 'twere absurd to think that nature in the earth bred gold, perfect in the instant;
there must be remote matter." - Ben Jonson
"I don't know what the question is, but art is the answer." - Guy Conner
