A sad song for Rosebud

Click HERE to hear Abdullah Ibrahim.

Song: No Other Time

This is the only moment,
Time to find what each high and low meant.
Go well!
There can be no other time.

There have been vows unspoken.
Now when our hearts are still unbroken
Go well!
There can be no other time.

Just when we thought we'd never
Find a way to love for ever
Suddenly we are fancy free, and now . . .

There's no more time for waiting
We've spent too much time hesitating
Go well!
There can be no other time.
Stay well!
For this is the only time.
New words to Some Other Time, tune by Leonard Bernstein, original
words by Arthur Freed (from the film musical, On the Town.)

For tune, go to http://www.karldallas.com/someothertime.htm

27/07/08, 6.12pm
This is not a song of parting. Go well (Hamba Khalie in Zulu) and the
response, Stay well (Sala Khalie) suggest "until we meet again".

Alternate words for the bridge:

Time is a mighty river.
Drink from it now or never.
Suddenly it's time to see . . .

Link to a song, Some other time

A song that sums up my present mood

Song: Love don't die easy

There's a flower I've found in my garden.
It's been planted there under the trees.
You may call it Love in Idleness or Wild Pansy
But I give it the name Heart's Ease.
Now summer's passing and its colours are fading
As a cold autumn wind blows the leaves to the ground.
Love don't die easy though the earth may be freezing
As bitter the world it turns round.

chorus:
Love don't die easy, she don't die easy
Though flowers fade in the morning dew.
The seeds she planted in my heart's garden
Lie quiet in the earth below,
Love don't die easy love, for me and you.

Don't take the nectar from my eyelids
I want to love everything I see.
This magic potion breaks down barriers
Between us and them, between you and me.
I want to live the eternal truth
That life is lived within this Dream.
Our shapes may shift, our names may change.
Still things can't just be what they seem.

chorus:
Love don't die easy (etc)

I'd rather have flowers that fade in my garden
Than have no flowers at all.
The dew that waters the blossoming roses
Turns to frost in the fall.
Time doesn't heal, it festers,
Unless we betray not our heart.
Love's not bounded by anything
However long we're apart.

chorus:
Love don't die easy (etc)

Seasons that change come round again
Summer and autumn, winter and spring.
Moons wax and wane, day turns to night,
And flowers in my garden blossoming.
All life is in motion,
A dance of the hours.
Forward and back,
The fading of flowers.

chorus:
Love don't die easy (etc)

21/07/08, 7.16am

Note: This is a work in progress.

No tune has been composed as yet and when it has,

the words will probably change as they are fitted to the melody.

The sentiments are unlikely to change (though never say never).

Test

I do not need to test my love.
But I am testing a new way of posting from my desktop.

Still blooming

We planted seed
a lunar time ago.
Moon has waxed and waned,
rain come down,
puddles stream to wash our hopes away,
winds blown cold and mild,
some frost descended;
but sunshine also,
dancing with the joy of May buttercups
and daisies on our lawns.
The young shoot feels the pain
of forcing through
the earth chilled hard and unyielding,
but still our blossom beckons.

I'm a rotten gardener.
I interfere too much.
If anything I plant should flourish
the miracle is another's,
not my own.

But that is what it is:
a miracle.
Another's hand tends our lives
and brings our fruit to term.
Scarlet as the blood racing through our hearts,
rose petals scent
the gardener and the gardened,
the tiller and the tilled.

Seed time may be done,
these four weeks or more,
but harvest has long months
of climate change
to wither grapes upon our vine.
The sower sees
so many seeds blown away
or taken by the birds
whose voices crow like carrion.
We live on a small island,
ever victim to Atlantic storms.
We shelter in each other's arms.

I have had to learn
to let the growing follow
its own green logic.

God give me grace
to let it be so.

05/06/08, 2.40pm

Eurydice

My love is in love with death,
infatuated,
ready to jump this way or that
if he crooks his little finger.
She knows he is a destroyer
but she doesn't seem to care.
She longs to subsume herself
into this early grave.

To me, on the other hand,
he is an old friend
I must treat with respect.
He visits each October
and I stretch my hands
to the cold flames
of his autumnal fire.
We sit and discuss those who have left,
with love and regret,
an end to mourning,
a closure.
That is his function in my life,
for life it is,
his visitation the frame around
the seedtime and harvest
of the circling year.

This is the time of her time also,
but he stands at her invitation
between her self
and the promise of her being,
seeking non-being.
She is life itself,
and he should be just the janitor,
opening the doorway
to a fuller life.
She runs to another, darker door,
leading nowhere.

I have tried to charm her
back to the sense of what is,
rather than what could never be.
My harp jangles
with the wrongness of it.
My head is turned also.
And furies lie in wait
to tear our love to pieces.

If I do not take care
I could be lost
in this underworld
of abandoned souls.

He smiles.
The race is not to the swift,
but to those who disengage
from his crooked gameplan.
Les jeux ne sont pas faites,
and he loses.

She has bet all on black.
The wheel spins
and keeps on spinning.
In the dawn the sky is red.
A warning.

Pray God she heeds it.
28/05/08, 08.08am