To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last

[sovay]

My poem "Every Night and All" has been accepted by Nightmare Magazine. It is a poem of plague as much as the underworld; the title comes from the refrain of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," which I learned as a child from the singing of Buffy Sainte-Marie. It has threaded through my work ever since. (It plays a fleeting but central role in "The Boatman's Cure.") Years later I discovered she was singing a variation on the classical arrangement by Benjamin Britten, but as much as I admire the eerie lilt of Peter Pears' famously dry white tenor, less like the living waking the dead than one ghost calling another down, the old sistrum jangle behind Sainte-Marie terrified me in childhood and no amount of strings and horns can change that even now.

Comments

[selkie]

I don’t think I can be moral because I don’t twitch very hard at some kinds of murder, but if you take a post for the public good and you reap its rewards, it’s your duty to make with the hosen and shoon in proportion and abundance.

Lotta barefoot unhoused people sleeping on the steps of those white stone buildings in DC.