Breeze blew ‘cross Byzantium
ages ago,
passing passion along from ancient souls
o’er peninsulas and shoals.
From Alexandria to Andalusia
it blew the Medi stirring of our arcane East
by westward winds past the European feast.
So it drifted between Aranjuez and Zagreb
in periodic flow and ebb
with rhyrhmic ebb and flow
through passionnata on stringéd bow . . .
. . . at providential and the muse’ behest,
and set in sculpted stone: eternal rest;
portraying Piéta Jesu through Michelangelo,
as still the women come and go
‘cross Eliot’s wasteland scenario.
From Ave Maria in Madrid
this opus we/they did;
even SaintSaens’ secular Swan
summons that age-old bond:
reflecting melancholic tension
in existential apprehension
again and again and again;
the passion passes
through striving laborious hands
in colored or melodic strands.
On moonlit nights;
sonata strains reflect the light
from hand to frantic hand
and back again.
Did history require
two world wars
and a string of smaller frays
to say
our living legacy dies daily?
Yet does our living tragedy thrive daily,
in this human soul of frailty.
Why even a saintless ’60’s Superstar
drove our anguished digression,
our zeitgeist obsession,
as passion passed through
rejected hands again
as passion passed through
conflicted lives again
as passion passes through
immigrant pathos again
and again and again
to reveal those nail-scarred hands again
Again.
Must be something to it;
we should not eschew it:
Those despiséd and rejected ones of men--
again and again and again:
the passing man of sorrow,
yesterday, today, tomorrow—
the woman acquainted with grief,
through death that steals in like a thief
the stranger and the strange,
Again and again and again.
Must be something to it;
we should not eschew it.
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