prometheus or icarus?

{a furnace in the trees, looking over the river valley from sask. drive, last last wednesday afternoon }

I'm not overly fond of the sound, the phonetic texture, of the German word Weltschmerz ('velt-shmerts'), but it really is so evocative, so apt. It's not just summed up by a gloss like 'world-weariness'. & it's not necessarily pessimistic. You can feel it, but not be tired of the world at all -- you are just feeling such a profound sadness, something that aches because of all that is bad, cruel & abhorrent in a world that is, (I believe) at its heart, so wonderful, divine, & good.

* * *

I admit I wasn't immediately taken by the music of Joanna Newsom. Bu, oh! soon I was smitten. Her turn of phrase makes me smile, & her harp makes me ache. Here is 'En Galop' (mp3!)

And I go where the trees go,
and I walk from a higher education
(for now, for hire)

And it beats me, but I do not know. [repeat]

Palaces and stormclouds
the rough, straggly sage, and the smoke
and the way it will all come together
(in quietness, in time)

(Joanna Newsom, 'En Galop')

* * *
Petition here.

Rough notes (which may grow into poem) below:

i)

when my mother was young
she feared nothing more
than the flash of the bomb, the rush
to duck / cover
facedown /curled up

on classroom carpet,
like a fetal turtle
to wait for the shadows to pass,
for ash to rain down like chalkdust,
nauseous at the thought of separation--

mother / daughter
flesh / skeleton, that’s
what her brothers told her
it would be like being
engulfed by the sun –

families on her street
with their little concrete
beehives built in their
backyards, filled with their
tin-can / water barrel honeycombs

that’s where she’d run if the siren sounded,
where they’d all hide from the
fire falling, & the long ashy winter,
cursing a terrible creation,
the theft of that blasted fire –

ii )

this month white-coats slowly
slipped the hands of the doomsday
clock two dashes closer / it’s sitting
at five to midnight
but i’m not scared of that –

i’m more concerned
that up in iqaluit they’ve realized
they’ve not yet got a word for the bird
with a breast ruddy as seal blood,
they’ve never seen one before –

those robins gone north to warmth,
& orange trees perish in frosty california.
a woman in the maldives watches
her sands swiftly dissolving, thousands of lives
falling in the sudden swell of the sea –

& she isn't so worried about nuclear
fission / fusion, no, she thinks,
we’re already melting
our wings of thread & beeswax,
those far-off people with wheels & oil bring us

seconds & seconds closer to the sun –