Survival: that too. It’s the old landscape, rediscovered
up here, where, for us, it’s more eternal.
These are the last days, or - which amounts to the same - the last years,
of plowed fields with tree trunks in rows over ditches,
of white mud around mulberry trees just pruned,
of embankments still green over dry canals.
Even here, where a pagan was once Christian, and with him
his land, his cultivated field…
A new age, with it dark years of barbarism,
its Romanesque Aprils, shall reduce all this
to nothingness, and so we may weep for it.
How can those who will not know this surviving earth
ever understand us? Or say who we once were?
Yet it is we who must understand them,
that they might be born, however lost to these bright days,
these magnificent winter stillnesses,
in the sweet, tempestuous South, the shadow-covered North…
Epilogue: Narcissus Dancing?
…
I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.
Polish pianist plays a "silent song of hope" to benefit the people of Ukraine, simultaneously intense, cathartic, and soothing. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 7, 2022
NYC polymath Wells develops rich, layered modern-classical compositions into reflections on queerness, climate change, and the AIDS crisis. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 18, 2022