Читать книгу Of Silence and Song - Dan Beachy-Quick - Страница 31

Some Animal Poems for Children to Learn and Sing

The Golden Age

Then the animals could talk in words.

The sparrow to the farmer sang

and the farmer sang along,

the pine and the laurel counseled

the honey in its tomb to sing a tune,

and the bees agreed with the deities

that the flowers perfumed the muse

and made prophecy the deeper root.

The Lion and the Bow

The fox pulled the arrow out

from the lion’s belly,

and told him to feel no fear.

“If this messenger stung you,

Fox, as it stung me, you’d see

courage snares the heart,

binds the foot, blinds the eye.

Better to live in the lonely glen

than be a brave fool and die.”

The Net and the Fish

The big ones stay in

and the little ones swim,

what’s glory in a frying-pan

compared to the living fin?

The Horse and the Ass

The burden you refuse

becomes the weight you bear,

the horse that scorned the ass

wears the whole pack

he refused to share.

The Fox on Fire

To punish the thief of the vines,

the farmer dipped in tallow the tail

and lit it on fire. But the fox in his fear

ran straight through the fields.

Now the threshing floor has no piled grain,

and the crop is cinder and ash.

The Nightingale and the Swallow

By singing in the dark the same song

They recognized each other—

The nightingale and the swallow.

“Come live with me under the eaves

and lessen with song the load of men

who till the earth to live.” “My song

is a torment I sing alone, the desert rock

echoes it, and the morning dew that cures

thirst is now my humble home.”

Some poems of Sappho’s found in the winding cloth around the body found in the sarcophagus. A poem of Catallus’s printed on thick vellum found, claret-stained, plugging the bunghole of a tun of wine. Ancient manuscripts discovered in bookshelves kept in tombs, reading for the afterlife, there with the jars of sealed honey and the mirrors of polished bronze.

Bees used to be thought psychopomps, traveling between the living and dead, gathering pollen, dancing their dances, and if you put a poem up next to your ear and wait patiently, sometimes you can hear in it the whole hive still buzzing.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that’s a lie.

These poems were found in a cell with a bench carved from the same stone that formed the walls. You can imagine the cell as a single chamber of a honeycomb, hexagonal, scented by honey that left, like tears, traces where down the wall it dripped. Outside the cell was Law—where Law used to be. There they sentenced a man to death for creating new gods and corrupting the youth. He wrote poems to pass the time, and these poems are those, here for the first time printed. All the casual reader won’t be able to appreciate is the paper itself the poems were written on. Dark gray and the ink barely darker. And, held up to the light, a faint watermark drawn by hand of a bee in flight.