sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2009-03-27 01:17 pm

It's another bad dream that seems to've caught us in our lie

Nobody told me Mission of Burma was recording their fourth studio album. Eric? *crickets*

I am still not very interactive, sorry.

Now the great Bear and Pleiades where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher in storm or starlight
The written character of a friendly fate—
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again?

—Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes (1945)

[identity profile] timesygn.livejournal.com 2009-03-27 04:38 pm (UTC)(link)
37.
--

After the plague, the city-wall caked with flies, the smoke's
amnesia,
learn, wanderer, to go nowhere like the stones since
your nose and eyes are now your daughter's hand;
go where the repetition of the breakers grows easier
to bear, no father to kill, no citizens to convince,
and no longer force your memory to understand
whether the dead elect their own government
under the jurisdiction of the sea-almonds;
certain provisions of conduct seal them to a silence
none dare break, and one noun made them transparent,
where they live beyond the conjugation of tense
in their own white city. How easily they disown us,
and everything here that undermines our toil.
Sit on your plinth in the last light of Colonus,
let your knuckled toes root deep in their own soil.
A butterfly quietly alights on a tyrant's knee;
sit among the sea-eaten boulders and
let the night wind sweep the terraces of the sea.
This is the right light, this pewter shine on the water,
not the carnage of clouds, not the expected wonder
of self-igniting truth and oracular rains,
but these shadows as gentle as the voice of your daughter,
while the gods fade like thunder in the rattling mountains.

- Derek Walcott, THE BOUNTY