souls of song

 

.

 

Remember when our songs were just like prayers.
Like gospel hymns that you called in the air.
Come down come down sweet reverence,
Unto my simple house and ring...
And ring

Ring like silver, ring like gold
Ring out those ghosts on the Ohio
Ring like clear day wedding bells
Were we the belly of the beast or the sword that fell...
We’ll never tell

Come to me clear and cold on some sea
Watch the world spinning waves, like that machine

Now I’ve been crazy couldn’t you tell
I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
Now I’m covered up in straw, belly up on the table
Well I drank and sang, and passed in the stable.

That tall grass grows high and brown,
Well I dragged you straight in the muddy ground
And you sent me back to where I roam
Well I cursed and I cried, but now i know...
now I know

And I ran back to that hollow again
The moon was just a sliver back then
And I ached for my heart like some tin man
When it came oh it beat and it boiled and it rang...
oh it's ringing

Ring like crazy, ring like hell
Turn me back into that wild haired gale
Ring like silver, ring like gold
Turn these diamonds straight back into coal

—Gregory Alan Isakov

The Stable Song 

.

I’ve figured it out, something that was never clear to me before—how all creation transposes itself out of the world deeper and deeper into our inner world, and why birds cast such a spell on this path into us. 

The bird’s nest is, in effect, an outer womb given by nature; the bird only furnishes it and covers it rather than containing the whole thing inside itself. 

As a result, birds are the animals whose feelings have a very special, intimate familiarity with the outer world; they know that they share with nature their innermost mystery. 

That is why the bird sings its songs into the world as though it were singing into its inner self; that’s why we take a birdsong into our own innerselves so easily. It seems to us that we translate it fully, with no remainder, into our feelings. 

A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, night, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song. 


—Ezra Pound
Cino, Personae: The Shorter Poems

.

All that is human slips away;
everything was mere husk. 

All that is left, indivisible,
is birdsong and dusk.

—Varlam Shalamov

All that is Human

Penguin Book of Russian Poetry 

.