Love Under Fire

[todayiamadaisy]

Something I have learnt today: a composer called Julius Fucik wrote a piece of music called 'Entry of the Gladiators'. Imagine gladiators entering the arena: sweaty, muscly men getting ready to fight each other or lions or elephants or, like, really big lizards. Whatever the Romans had to hand. Anyway, imagine them coming into the arena to the baying crowd. Now imagine them coming into the arena to the baying crowd to the sound of this (the first 15 seconds is enough to see the problem):

I bet Julius Fucik is really ticked off about the use we've made of that piece of music. We've completely ruined the mood he was going for.

This week's random word:

6. Peregrine

This week I asked the word generator for an adjective and it gave me peregrine. Thanks, word generator. My thought process went something like: peregrine... falcon? - peregrine means migratory, doesn't it? - I should check that - yes: migratory, travelling, foreign, alien, roving, wandering, nomadic or unsettled - what do I have to say about that? - absolutely nothing.

I could tell you about the peregrine falcon being the most widespread species of raptor. Also, while they generally cruise at about 65 kmh (40 mph), when hunting they go into a high-speed dive known as a stoop, reaching over 322 kmh (200 mph), making them the fastest animal on the planet. Take that, cheetahs! But none of that is particularly related to their migration.

So thinking of peregrine obviously had me thinking about birds and migration, and that put me in mind of a poem I had to do for Year 12 literature: The Death of the Bird by Australian poet, AD Hope. All these years later, I think this is the only poem I had to write about for that exam that still sticks with me. I find it immensely sad. Cinematic, almost, too, in the way it swells: you can picture a close-up on the little bird, then the camera going further back and back and back until all you see is a tiny dot in the sky, suddenly falling.

The Death of the Bird - AD Hope

For every bird there is this last migration;
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home;

And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest;
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
And exiled love mourning within the breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;
The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scraps of stone.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger,
The delicate voice, more urgent with despair,
Custom and fear constraining her no longer,
Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place.
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.

She feels it close now, the appointed season:
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign,
The immense and complex map of hills and rivers
Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design.

And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief not malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.



Next week: Back to nouns with 'purse'