My daughter has a beautiful voice. And I’ve always been proud of mine, too. So during her study breaks, we’re singing together. I never learned to play any instrument, but her piano lessons paid off; she can accompany us.
She loves The Old Churchyard (Offa Rex) . It is a beautiful tune. I called up the words on my IPad, but….I couldn’t get through the song.
I saw leaning tombstones, their inscriptions softened and blurred by time like dirty icing, I saw those small marble lambs they put on babies’ graves, I saw the oblong depressions of new graves where the headstones haven’t arrived yet. I thought of the lychgate, where the coffin enters the cemetery through a small arch and the procession pauses for prayer. I started crying. Who wouldn’t?
Well, I wouldn’t, ordinarily. Or should I saw formerly?
“When I am dead, and over me bright April/ Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,/Though you should lean above me broken-hearted/ I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful/ When rain bends down the bough./And I shall be as cruel and hard-hearted/ As you are now.”
—Sara Teasdale
After reading a trilogy about WWI and then falling right into Sebastian Barry’s novel about the American Civil War, I reckon I’m just not in the mood to see the romantic aspect of death. Or maybe you can only see that very early in life.
(Simon’s war haiku reminds me about Ssssoon. He was shot in the head by friendly fire. Didn’t die of it, though; he died in some nursing home at age 81.)
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Brilliant as usual, Hypatia, Thank you
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Glad you and your daughter can share music-making together, Hypatia. I don’t mind telling you, though, that Chaps is a bit concerned about the dour turn these lovely posts are taking….Have you tried Anne Perry’s WWI quintet of mysteries, following a widower Anglican university instructor who chooses chaplaincy at the front? Great stories that tell the truth, but are a bit lighter.
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Thanks, Nanda ! And congrats: Venango County is in the yellow phase of reopening. I dk when Monroe will ever get there. Unfortunately we had a buncha New Yorkers who fled here after 9/11 and who still make the commute. I’m so sick ‘n’ tired of this…
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Don’t blame you at all, Hyp….
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The Marine Corps ordered me to die young leave a beautiful corpse, but I failed in my mission. Now I find solace in that failure by contributing to the college funds of numerous coeds and doing what I can for widows and orphans.
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Hypatia, in one of my poems the North Star represents the truth or what C.S. Lewis calls the tao. The only guide to the tao is one’s daimon. Could it be this sinos-infection combined with your readings have you listening to that still small voice, your daimon, as never before? If so, perhaps your tears stem from truth burning away those aspects of your foundational belief system that have always and only existed outside the tao? The truth may make you free but not without exacting a price.
Or not. I think I might have smoked too much ganja today but at least I was able to come up with all of that without the usual fever dream.
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I think I was just feeling sorry for myself. My daughter is going to forge on into the future without me. Duh. No biggie, or rather, it’s a universal biggie. She must increase and I must decrease. Does it even matter anymore what I think about anything?
But wait, Lewis uses the term “daimon”? I didn’t know that! Philip Pullman (“His Dark Materials”) hates Lewis, yet he uses that word to describe people’s external souls which take animal form.
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I cannot recall whether or not Lewis used the word daimon, but he believed it.
What you think only matters to all of us for whom you guide towards finding the North Star.
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