steve44uk
Baleful
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2010
- Posts
- 4,128
So I'm sitting on the train home, writing. A song from my teenage years pops into my head. In the early '80s, David Bowie starred in a TV adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Baal, a play about an unpleasant, nihilistic itinerant singer and poet in early 20th century Germany.
I was already deeply in man-love with Bowie, and the sensibilities of the play (bleak doesn't even come close) resonated deeply with the angry young man I was becoming.
One song, though, particularly stayed with me. It's called 'Remembering Marie A'. and while it's pretty melancholy (and, if I'm honest, mysogynistic), it's also to my mind a song / poem of great beauty. So here you are...
It was a day in that blue month September
Silent beneath the plum trees’ slender shade.
I held her there, my love so pale and silent,
As if she were a dream that must not fade.
Above us in the shining summer heaven
There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon.
It was quite white and very high above us,
Then I looked up and found that it had gone
And since that day, so many moons in silence
Have swum across the sky and gone below.
The plum trees surely have been chopped for firewood
And if you ask, "How does that love seem now?"
I must admit, I really can’t remember.
And yet I know what you are trying to say.
But what her face was like, I know no longer.
I only know I kissed it on that day.
As for the kiss, I long ago forgot it,
But for the cloud that floated in the sky
I know that still and shall forever know it.
It was quite white and moved in very high.
It may be that the plum trees still are blooming.
That woman’s seventh child may now be there.
And yet that cloud had only bloomed for minutes.
When I looked up it vanished on the air.
I was already deeply in man-love with Bowie, and the sensibilities of the play (bleak doesn't even come close) resonated deeply with the angry young man I was becoming.
One song, though, particularly stayed with me. It's called 'Remembering Marie A'. and while it's pretty melancholy (and, if I'm honest, mysogynistic), it's also to my mind a song / poem of great beauty. So here you are...
It was a day in that blue month September
Silent beneath the plum trees’ slender shade.
I held her there, my love so pale and silent,
As if she were a dream that must not fade.
Above us in the shining summer heaven
There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon.
It was quite white and very high above us,
Then I looked up and found that it had gone
And since that day, so many moons in silence
Have swum across the sky and gone below.
The plum trees surely have been chopped for firewood
And if you ask, "How does that love seem now?"
I must admit, I really can’t remember.
And yet I know what you are trying to say.
But what her face was like, I know no longer.
I only know I kissed it on that day.
As for the kiss, I long ago forgot it,
But for the cloud that floated in the sky
I know that still and shall forever know it.
It was quite white and moved in very high.
It may be that the plum trees still are blooming.
That woman’s seventh child may now be there.
And yet that cloud had only bloomed for minutes.
When I looked up it vanished on the air.
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