Beethoven
What is it about his music that appeals?The humour is cruel, or very bad form,The lyricism is, well, really a little forced.
Which leaves the anger and the hurtAnd perhaps the vision of a god.Is that enough to keep us enthralled?
There is no other way out. We are drawn inBy the very obstinacy of the man.Oh yes, he was deaf as a lamppost in the end
So that he never heard a note of it,We listen still, and we hear the soundOf what it was like to be alone.
We are surrounded. After all these yearsWe have to believe that god was important.That music was important and that Beethoven
Somehow heard all the motives in us.We are forbidden to weepBut we have learned to rejoice. All things
Shall be given to us. Like it or notWe are in his company and the giftTakes us out of this world and puts us in it.
Birds
If there were no birds would we invent them?Certainly we dream of flightBut would our imagination stretch to them?
And what else is beyond our capacityTo visualise? We dream so many thingsAlthough there are limitations. Some things defy us.
Birds not only have wings, they make movement,Something to surprise us each time.They make us rejoice whenever they come.
We are stuck to the ground and to the groundWe eventually come, even though we inventedA sort of flight. We kid ourselves.
We are permitted to dream but our dreams are half-hearted.There are some things we are able to knowAnd there are things beyond us. We invented gunpowder.
The flight of kingfishers
I was always too willing to claim for myselfThe right of vision, as if only ISaw the magic flight of kingfishers
Or the view from the top of the mountain.Others had been there before meAnd at that very moment were left wondering.
The only thing I could really claimWas a way of getting it downWhich was more or less authentic
Give or take a tendency to exaggerationOr an inclination towards what rhetoric could do.I was a liar from the start.
Except that I did see these thingsAnd felt them. What use are they now?I close my eyes. There is nothing more to see.
The kingfisher still plunges