Poems for a Nuclear Age of Pandemic

Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman

offers words of hope amid pandemic

April 17, 2020

Let's GoForth

by W.B. Yeats

“Let us go forth,

the tellers of tales,

and seize whatever prey

the heart longs for,

and have no fear.

Everything exists,

everything is true,

and the earth is only a

little dust under our feet.”

W.B. Yeats

The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

Jan 1, 1893

During difficult times…

by Elena Mikhalkova

“Grandma once gave me a tip:

During difficult times,

you move forward in small steps.

Do what you have to do,

but little by bit.

Don’t think about the future,

not even what might happen tomorrow.

Wash the dishes.

Take off the dust.

Write a letter.

Make some soup.

Do you see?

You are moving forward step by step.

Take a step and stop.

Get some rest.

Compliment yourself.

Take another step.

Then another one.

You won’t notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.

And time will come when you can think

about the future without crying.

Good morning.”

Elena Mikhalkova

The Room of Ancient Keys

And the People Stayed Home

by Kitty O'Meara

And the people stayed home.

And read books,

and listened, and rested,

and exercised, and made art,

and played games,

and learned new ways of being,

and were still.

And listened more deeply.

Some meditated,

some prayed,

some danced,

some met their shadows,

And the people began

to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people,

living in ignorant,

dangerous,

mindless,

and heartless ways,

the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed,

And the people joined together again,

they grieved their losses,

and made new choices,

and dreamed new images,

and created new ways to live

and healed the earth fully,

as they had been healed.

Kitty O’Meara

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One

Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

Other Press, October 19, 2010

“The effect, in Montaigne’s time as in our own, can be intoxicating. A sixteenth-century admirer, Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. 

Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.”

“So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century novelist André Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.”

And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.”

The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”

Tic Toc

by Tony Smith

93,047 words I’ve found of my writing. I still have 2014 thru 2019 to search. 11 years total of FB. I have more somewhere. A typical novel is 75,000 words. I swear I didn’t know I had this much. I’m a lazy writer. I do not write everyday. I’m discouraged that I won’t get it all together before my time on the boulder comes to an end. Discouraged there is so much more in my noggin’ I haven’t pulled out yet. Discouraged I am having trouble now remembering, finding the right word, even spelling. I’m afraid this is an effect of the tick fever or the onset of an elder mental disability. I never wanted to write as much as I do now. I never thought anyone else would like it enough to encourage me. I never tried to be published like I do now. Hoping for a name brand publisher instead of self publishing. But that takes a great deal of luck and time and I hear tic toc and see the leaves come and go. Tic toc like my heartbeat I heard in my ears as a child.

The man who edits for me is 73. His tic toc I wonder which of ours will stop first. If I’m lucky, I’m in the morning and I'll limp to the coffee pot. Take the 1st round of meds. I’ll start on desk chores I hate. I’ll hope I don’t hurt too much to perform outside tasks. I’ll find a way to sit at the keyboard after a story rushes through my brain and I can at least remember the motion of it, a smell, a noise, the trigger of it. I write a lot of humor but there is also pitch black and tears and screams and clawing in my head. I need to get that out too but watching your reaction is hard to do. The truth is hard to look at, it brings fear, regret, remorse and shame to me. The fear of no reaction is maybe worse.

There it goes again. While I am pecking with my thumb on the iPad qwerty with one eye open, the tic toc becoming bolder taking me to a tomorrow I hope. G'nite. I never am quite sure where I’ll go when I tap the keys.

Tony Smith

April 22, 2020

I thought a song for sheltering in place might be Too Much Time On My Hands by Styx, but chose Chasing Cars as it speaks to being with someone you love and just forgetting about the troubles of the world. Weird video, but I like this song. - TJ

Snow Patrol - Chasing Cars (2007 version)

Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Anne Sexton

Samuel Mang'era, Kenyatta University's Arboretum in Nairobi | PTP Studios

 Messages to the Coronavirus

Link to NPR article here

by Eyder Peralta

International Correspondent, East Africa

"We also cannot afford to pay you too much attention" -

especially with a huge plague of locusts at hand.

- Samuel Mang'era

Dear Corona virus,

Welcome to Kenya. A few things you should know. Here we don't die of flu, don't be surprised if you fail to succeed. Usishangae [Don't be surprised], everything fails in Kenya. We are more likely to die of a cholera attack than to be killed by you. For us, every day is a run escape from death. We are the walking dead. Death is part of our lives the shadow that lingers over us from the time the umbilical cord is cut and buried behind the house to the time we fundraise for expensive arrangements to bury a no longer useful block of dead meat. Death can befall us anytime and we are not scared. It if comes, let it come. Why worry over what we can't control? Everything dies right? Even you corona will die!

Samuel Mang'era

Poem by Crown Heights Jewish Teen Goes Viral

Grief

by Nancy Cross Dunham

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that it need not be

a heavy gray shawl

to wrap myself in,

clutching my arms tightly

across my chest

nor ...

need it be

a granite rock

that I should try

to push away

neither is it ...

... at least, no longer ...

a vast dark ocean

ready to pick me up

and slap me down

without warning

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that it is not me,

but that it offers

to become a friend

a friend ...

who will lightly lay a hand

on my shoulder

when tears come in the dark

a friend ...

who will laugh

out loud with me

at remembered silly moments

a friend ...

who can still hear

the music of our life

what I'm learning about grief ...

is that this friend

doesn't intend

to leave me

but promises

to hold my hand

to carry my memories

a friend ...

who will bear witness to my love

as I venture

toward the next day

and the following night

Nancy Cross Dunham

“The Peace of Wild Things”

by Wendell Berry

Listen,

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Video Link

Sonic Artist Lei Liang - Painting Lost Landscapes, Spiritual and Physical, ​with a Sonic Brush

"Landscapes," album leaf by Huang Binhong. |  Image courtesy
of Elna Tsao with support from the Mozhai Foundation

Painting Lost Landscapes,

Spiritual and Physical,

with a Sonic Brush

Source Link - Open Horizons

Lei Liang -

A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams

​Program Note
​

I always wanted to create music as if painting with a sonic brush. I think in terms of curves and lines, light and shadows, distances, the speed of the brush, textures, gestures, movements and stillness, layering, blurring, coloring, the inter-penetration of ink, brushstrokes, energy, breath, spatial resonance, spiritual vitality, void and emptiness.

​

A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams meditates on the loss of landscapes of cultural and spiritual dimensions. The work implies an intention to preserve and resurrect parallel landscapes - both spiritual and physical – and sustain a place where we and our children can belong.

​

Using a sonic brush, I paint an inner journey: A landscape emerges out of darkness, illuminated by an artist’s inner vision; distant contours, shapes, hints of color, and emptiness. As the viewer draws closer and closer to the landscape, lines and human presence begin to emerge, sounds to resonate, until we become one with each of its brush-strokes and ink splashes, with its every breath. The mountains are breathing, singing and roaring. The landscape vibrates, pulsates and dances; it takes flight; it stirs, swells, rises, grinds, surges, stretches and blooms; trembling, jolting, and collapsing, it breaks into fragments. ... Rain – drops and drops of rain – returns, to heal the landscape in ruin. A prayer, a resurrection, the rain brings life back to the landscapes, and it regains its gentle heartbeat.

--Lei Liang

Artist Bio

Lei Liang (b.1972) began his musical studies in China, completing them in the USA. His music aims at a deeper philosophical engagement with musical sound as a tool for reflection and contemplation, while resisting exoticized and formulaic treatment of Asian musical elements. Liang's music is deeply philosophical, yet sensual, evocative, yet abstract, and disciplined, yet spontaneous.

He studied composition with Harrison Birtwistle, Chaya Czernowin, Joshua Fineberg, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. He now teaches at UCSD (San Diego).

• Written for the Arditti String Quartet, Serashi Fragments is a tribute to the Mongolian chaoer (fiddler) Serashi (1887-1968). In this highly virtuosic piece, Liang deploys a wide range of articulation for strings: pizzicato sul pont, stacatissimo, Bartók pizzicato, glissando, harmonics, and glissando harmonics.

• In Some Empty Thoughts of a Person from Edo, Liang expands the timbral possibilities of the harpsichord through introducing "lute stops," clusters formed by the palm and fingers of each hand, along with other extended devices. A plucked passage with arpeggiated chords is reminiscent of the Japanese koto.

• Memories of Xiaoxiang for saxophone and tape presents a personal commentary on Liang's cultural past, including field recordings in the tape part.

• In Praise of Shadows for solo flute is a piece that invites philosophical contemplation on the duality of light and shadow, embodied by the barely audible partials in the multiphonics, whistling tones, or the downward portamento Liang often uses to end a phrase.

• Brush-Stroke allows the listener to be immersed in the transience of each sound as it comes into being and passes away. It is reminiscent of Japanese gagaku and Korean Aak court music.

• Liner notes by Yayoi Uno Everett.

Lei Liang - Brush Stroke

Additional Recordings w/Analysis - click here

Review in NY Times

​

"Over 30 minutes, the work unfurls a fluid stream of instrumental colors, from shimmering filaments of sound to broad sighing gestures that build with unrelenting momentum into muscular blocks of dark matter. A series of brutal percussive slashes leads to scorched silence. In the end, droplets of sound evoke a fragile rebirth.

​The work is intended as a reflection on the man-made destruction of both natural landscapes and cultural ecosystems, and highlights the power of art to preserve them — at least in memory. Mr. Liang teaches at the University of California at San Diego and has collaborated with scientists on innovative ways to record the sounds of Pacific Ocean coral reefs and Arctic fauna.

“We have the external world that we need to protect,” he said in the interview. At the same time, he warns against the kind of self-inflicted damage to a culture’s spiritual heritage that he feels left lasting wounds in his native China: “There is also an internal world that we need to nurture, because it can vanish very rapidly.”

-- Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, NY Times

Sonic Artist Lei Liang

SCORCHED SILENCE, FRAGILE REBIRTH, AWARD-WINNING MUSIC

http://www.bmop.org/news-press/scorched-silence-fragile-rebirth-award-winning-music

The New York Times

by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

December 13, 2019

The apartment building in which the composer Lei Liang grew up, in Beijing in the 1970s, was a musicological beehive. Its residents worked at the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts, which had an archive of rare historical recordings that had been saved, often at great personal cost, from destruction in the Cultural Revolution.

Mr. Liang’s father was an authority on Chinese opera; his mother, an expert on American music. Many evenings, a Mongolian friend of the family would drop by for drinks and impromptu performances of war songs, dances and epic poems.

On one wall of the apartment hung a photograph of Mr. Liang’s mother interviewing Aaron Copland in his Westchester, N.Y., home. Years later, as a young composer, Mr. Liang came to live and work there when he won a residency at Copland House, now a foundation.

“Because of that photo,” he said in a recent phone interview, “I found that environment strangely familiar.”

The emotional resonance of fragile environments, both natural and cultural, is captured in haunting ways in the music of Mr. Liang, 47, who this month was honored with the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, one of the most prestigious prizes in contemporary music. He won for an orchestral work, “A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams,” inspired by a landscape painting by the Chinese ink-brush master Huang Binhong (1865-1955).

Over 30 minutes, the work unfurls a fluid stream of instrumental colors, from shimmering filaments of sound to broad sighing gestures that build with unrelenting momentum into muscular blocks of dark matter. A series of brutal percussive slashes leads to scorched silence. In the end, droplets of sound evoke a fragile rebirth.

The work is intended as a reflection on the man-made destruction of both natural landscapes and cultural ecosystems, and highlights the power of art to preserve them — at least in memory. Mr. Liang teaches at the University of California at San Diego and has collaborated with scientists on innovative ways to record the sounds of Pacific Ocean coral reefs and Arctic fauna.

“We have the external world that we need to protect,” he said in the interview. At the same time, he warns against the kind of self-inflicted damage to a culture’s spiritual heritage that he feels left lasting wounds in his native China: “There is also an internal world that we need to nurture, because it can vanish very rapidly.”

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:

What drew you to the painting that inspired “A Thousand Mountains”?

Huang Binhong painted this particular set of magnificent landscapes late in life, when he was almost blind. I was fascinated by how a person could use his inner vision to create something even more beautiful than reality, with the environment collapsing.

What are some aspects of the painting that made it into the music?

Huang Binhong made this remark that you have to use white as black. He was referring to void and emptiness that are as substantial as that which is painted with ink. I apply that to my music in a very concrete way. I have a lot of emptiness and silence in the music. I think of those moments as containers of memory and historical resonance.

The end of “A Thousand Mountains” recalls water, with plucked strings and subtle percussion effects, but without using the amplified sounds of actual water, as some of your colleagues might do. Why?

That’s a lesson I learned from traditional Peking Opera: You do not portray anything realistically. In Peking opera alone there were more than a hundred kinds of coughing sounds. Depending on the role types and what the cough symbolizes — whether you’re entering or interrupting a conversation — it was expressed in a particular vocal way. I was very inspired by this idea to not portray things realistically, but to find an imaginative way to filter an idea and distill it using purely instrumental means.

“A Thousand Mountains” is itself the result of a process of distillation, isn’t it?

Yes, and it’s very much about recovering and reimagining my own history. I was acutely aware of how fragile my own cultural and spiritual landscapes are. After I started working on this project, which started with the analysis of the landscape painting and going through electronic music experimentation and transforming that into an experience using purely acoustic instruments, I discovered the connection of the inner landscape that was disappearing before our eyes and how that parallels the environmental landscape that is collapsing around us.

Were there specific examples of environmental depredation that came to mind?

The first time I went back to China, six years after moving to America, I lost my voice because of the pollution. I didn’t recognize my own city. I also think of Mongolia, whose music was one of my earliest loves, and of the sand storms that now come in from the desert there, which some researchers have attributed to the overconsumption of beef in China. And, of course, now in California there are the fires that affect us and personal friends.

You have spoken of the cultural epiphany you experienced when you arrived in the United States at 17. How did the move change you?

I discovered China in America. It was only in Austin, Tex., and then during my 14 years in Boston studying at the New England Conservatory and Harvard, that I really reconstructed my family’s past, my culture’s past. These were things that we hadn’t been taught — in fact things that were denied. I hand-copied Buddhist and Taoist classics and treatises on paintings. I learned the traditional Chinese characters on my own because I had not been taught them in mainland China.

It takes some effort and even struggle to earn a membership in a cultural community. I mean, I was born a Chinese citizen. But to be Chinese culturally and spiritually? That is a process, a cultivation and, in the end, a path of self-discovery. It’s about what we choose to inherit.

The study of calligraphy, poetry and traditional painting were central to the Chinese concept of the wenren, or Renaissance man. How do you identify with that term?

It’s a challenge to see myself as a vessel, as an imaginative and creative force that has a place in history — so that you create while you preserve at the same time. Today, in a different world, that encompasses the environmental, cultural and spiritual responsibilities an artist has.

*wenren - The Qing literati (wenren Chinese:文人) were officially designated as literate or cultivated persons. Parallel to wenren are two terms, "shi"(Chinese:士), scholar, and "shen"(Chinese:绅), often defined as gentry or official. - Wikipedia

John Prine - Boundless Love

John Prine, Boundless Love

BOUNDLESS LOVE

Link

by Jay McDaniel

Appreciation for the American country folk

singer-songwriter and for boundless love

Thank you, John Prine.

An angel from Montgomery, now residing in the boundless love of the great forgiveness, received one of her own into her arms on April 7, 2020: the singer-songwriter John Prine.

Missing you, John. And sending love to your family. By the way, the great forgiveness, is another name for what process theologians like me call the consequent nature of God. This is the side of God that is totally accepting. My own mentor, John Cobb, experienced it one night, and describes it as an experience of total transformation, boundless love, and full acceptance. Legend has it that this side of God is filled with more angels than even Montgomery can hold. As you find your rest, John, please send some more our way. But wait! You already sent so many, didn’t you, with your songs. Thank you so much.

John Prine: Boundless Love

I woke up this morning to a garbage truck

Looks like this old horseshoe's done run out of luck

If I came home, would you let me in?

Fry me some pork chops and forgive my sin?

Surround me with your boundless love

Confound me with your boundless love

I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be

When you found me with your boundless love

Sometimes my old heart is like a washing machine

It bounces around 'til my soul comes clean

And when I'm clean and hung out to dry

I'm gonna make you laugh until you cry

Surround me with your boundless love

Confound me with your boundless love

I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be

When you found me with your boundless love

If by chance I should find myself at risk

A-falling from this jagged cliff

I look below, and I look above

I'm surrounded by your boundless love

Surround me with your boundless love

Confound me with your boundless love

I was drowning in the sea, lost as I could be

When you found me with your boundless love

You dumbfound me with your boundless love

You surround me with your boundless lov

- John Prine

Joan Baez: For John and Fiona Prine

March 2020: Shared while John was critically ill

with  COVID-19 and Fiona had also tested positive

John Prine and his wife/manager Fiona Whelan Prine at Prine’s album release party
for The Tree of Forgiveness in Nashville in 2018. | Photo: Neilson Hubbard

John Prine’s Wife Fiona Whelan Prine

Shares Message Following Legendary

Singer-Songwriter’s Passing

Music Row link

by Jessica Nicholson

April 8, 2020

John Prine‘s wife and manager, Fiona Whelan Prine, shared a post on Facebook following John Prine’s death on Tuesday (April 7) at age 73 due to complications from the COVID-19 coronavirus.

She shared that she was able to be with Prine in the hours before his passing, and urged readers to follow the guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She also asked that in lieu of gifts or flowers, that readers donate to organizations including Thistle Farms, Nashville Rescue Mission and Room in the Inn. John and Fiona wed in 1996; John Prine is also survived by three sons, Jody, Jack and Tommy, as well as two brothers and three grandchildren.

Message from Fiona Whelan Prine - 

Our beloved John died yesterday evening at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville TN. We have no words to describe the grief our family is experiencing at this time. John was the love of my life and adored by our sons Jody, Jack and Tommy, daughter in law Fanny, and by our grandchildren.

John contracted Covid-19 and in spite of the incredible skill and care of his medical team at Vanderbilt he could not overcome the damage this virus inflicted on his body.
I sat with John – who was deeply sedated- in the hours before he passed and will be forever grateful for that opportunity.

My dearest wish is that people of all ages take this virus seriously and follow guidelines set by the CDC. We send our condolences and love to the thousands of other American families who are grieving the loss of loved ones at this time – and to so many other families across the world.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the outpouring of love we have received from family, friends, and fans all over the world. John will be so missed but he will continue to comfort us with his words and music and the gifts of kindness, humor and love he left for all of us to share.

 

* * * * * * * * * *

Taste of Country -John Prine Website

Wikipedia - Who Is John Prine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Prine

John Prine (October 10, 1946 – April 7, 2020) was an American country folk singer-songwriter. He was active as a composer, recording artist, and live performer from the early 1970s until his death and was known for an often humorous style of original music that has elements of protest and social commentary.

Born and raised in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at the age of 14. He attended classes at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music.[1] After serving in West Germany with the U.S. Army, he returned to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked as a mailman, writing and singing songs first as a hobby, and then becoming a club performer.

A member of Chicago's folk revival, Prine credited film critic Roger Ebert and singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson with discovering him, resulting in the production of Prine's eponymous debut album with Atlantic Records in 1971. The acclaim earned by this LP led Prine to focus on his musical career, and he recorded three more albums for Atlantic. He then signed with Asylum Records, where he recorded an additional three albums. In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent record label with which he would release most of his subsequent albums.

Widely cited as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, Prine was known for humorous lyrics about love, life, and current events, as well as serious songs with social commentary and songs that recollect melancholy tales from his life. In 2020, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

John Prine: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

March 2018

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Amazon Link

"Surround me with your boundless love.

Confound me with your boundless love.

- John Cobb

In his Theological Reminiscences John Cobb tells readers about a time in his life when, for perhaps a minute or so, he felt surrounded by God as a pure, boundless love. He was in the army in WWII, living in a room in Arlington, Virginia. He had recently undertaken the discipline of directing positive feelings toward everyone he saw; and one night, as he knelt beside his bed for a “relatively perfunctory prayer," the experience fell upon him. Unbidden, and to his surprise, he had a feeling, a feeling of being loved totally accepted, just as he was. “The room was transformed, it was filled with spirit, it was filled with love.” Don't we all seek to be totally accepted, just as we are. Even and maybe especially when our horseshoes have run out of luck, and we're at risk of falling off a jagged cliff. Isn't it at this point, if not many others, when we seek that angel from Montgomery. And isn't it good that she arrives in so many forms? - Jay McDaniel

Book Blurb

In these remarkably intimate and forthcoming “reminiscences,” theologian and philosopher John B. Cobb, Jr., reflects on major theological developments of the last sixty years, from the Latin American, feminist, and black liberation theologies, to Vatican II, the “death of God,” and the shift from existentialist to process philosophies. A major conviction of Cobb’s work—amply displayed in these reflections—is that theology must engage contemporary issues. To that end, he followed a transdisciplinary approach throughout his career, integrating insights from many different areas of study and bringing different specialized disciplines into fruitful communication. As a result, Cobb has been influential in a wide range of disciplines, including theology, ecology, economics, biology and social ethics. His descriptions of these encounters are rich in personal detail and refreshingly honest.

Boundless Love

by Henry Van Dyke

O Thou whose boundless love bestows

The joy of life, the hope of Heaven;
Thou whose unchartered mercy flows
O'er all the blessings Thou hast given;
Thou by whose light alone we see;
Thou by whose truth our souls set free
Are made imperishably strong;
Hear Thou the solemn music of our song.

Grant us the knowledge that we need
To solve the questions of the mind;
Light Thou our candle while we read,
And keep our hearts from going blind;
Enlarge our vision to behold
The wonders Thou hast wrought of old;
Reveal thyself in every law,
And gild the towers of truth with holy awe.

Be Thou our strength when war's wild gust
Rages around us, loud and fierce;
Confirm our souls, and let our trust
Be like a wall that none can pierce;
Give us the courage that prevails,
The steady faith that never fails,
Help us to stand in every fight
Firm as a fortress to defend the right.

O God, make of us what Thou wilt;
Guide Thou the labor of our hand;
Let all our work be surely built
As Thou, the architect, hast planned;
But whatsoe'er thy power shall make
Of these frail lives, do not forsake
Thy dwelling. Let thy presence rest
Forever in the temple of our breast.

Remembering The Beatles

Himesh Patel - Ob-la-di,Ob-la-da
(From "Yesterday"/2019)

The Beatles Greatest Hits Full Album
- Best The Beatles Songs Playlist









Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Iconic Songs | GQ



1 - Paul McCartney talks about the moment he realized George Harrison could ALSO write songs!

2 - Paul McCartney on Who Broke Up the Beatles

Ringo Starr Remembers Being Asked to Join the Beatles

Rare John Lennon Interview Footage

The Life and Career of John Lennon

The Beatles Greatest Hits Full Playlist
- Best Of The Beatles Full Album 2018









John Lennon meets Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney on “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”

The Beatles - Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da (Music Video)

Remembering Battlestar Galactica

BattleStar Galactica Theme

In a distant part of the universe, a human civilization has extended to a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, to which they have migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol. The Twelve Colonies have been engaged in a lengthy war with a cybernetic race known as the Cylons, whose goal is the extermination of the human race. The Cylons offer peace to the humans, which proves to be a ruse. With the aid of a human named Baltar, the Cylons carry out a massive attack on the Twelve Colonies and on the Colonial Fleet of starships that protected them. These attacks devastate the Colonial Fleet, lay waste to the Colonies, and virtually destroy their populations. Scattered survivors flee into outer space aboard a ragtag array of available spaceships. Of the entire Colonial battle fleet, only the Battlestar Galactica, a gigantic battleship and spacecraft carrier, now retired as a fifty year old museum artifact of Colonial War Days, appears to have survived the Cylon attack. Under the leadership of Commander William Adama, the Galactica and the pilots of "Viper fighters" lead a fugitive fleet of survivors in search of the fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.

From the darkness you must fall

Failed and weak, to darkness all.

Virtual Six: "It is what makes you human."

Baltar: "Is it? Not conscious thought?

Not poetry, or art, or music, literature?

Murder. Murder is my heritage?"

[Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis),

Battlestar Galactica, Season 2: Fragged]

---

Number Six: "You, your race, invented murder.

Invented killing for sport, greed, envy.

Its man's one true art form."

[Number Six (Tricia Helfer),

Battlestar Galactica, Season 2: Fragged]

---

When an old enemy, the Cylons, resurface and obliterate the 12 colonies,

the crew of the aged Galactica protect a small civilian fleet - the last of

humanity - as they journey toward the fabled 13th colony, Earth.

All This Happened Before

by R.E. Slater [adapted]

"All this has happened before

and will happen again,"

thought the Admiral;

What do you hear, Starbuck?

"Nothing but the rain."

"And it will happen again,"

thought Adama, fleet commander,

of decommissioned warship Galactica,

following "the rain across galaxies,

with fleeing maiden ship's in tow.

Remnants of the Colonies,

led by haunted tones echoing

Galactica's steeled chambers,

where Tyrol, among the five,

lied the enemy they've created.

Awakening from slumber, Kara,

war goddess, harbinger of death,

rises its music, hearing its call,

reliving a time before time began,

remembering distant lands.

She, who led lost colonies,

to homelands far and distant, before

time had begun, lost to memory;

whose grand cities mirrored

their many mistakes to be made.

Leading her lost colonies, to

a distant place; Earth, say some.

"What do you hear, Starbuck?"

"As in the beginning, so in the end,

this has happened before and will again."

- R.E. Slater

*Adapted with gratitude from Poem Link;

original poem by Pop Culture

Dreams of Earth

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3216487/1/Appreciating-Poetry

-Lysandros of Caprica

Beloved of the Gods, the happiest mortal I seem,

Sitting before thee, rapt at thy sight, hearing

Thy soft laughter and thy voice most gentle,

Speaking so passionately.

Them in my chest, my heart wildly flutters,

And, when on thee I gaze ever so ardently,

Bereft am I of all power of utterance,

My tongue [lies utterly] useless.

There rushes at once through my flesh, a tingling, fire,

My eyes are deprived of all power of vision,

My ears hear nothing but sounds of winds roaring,

And all is blackness.

And then, like as with Ambrosia, sweetly green,

Fire burns racing beneath my skin, intoxicating,

And Love, the ineluctable, with bitter sweetness,

Shakes my being.

Down courses in streams the sweat of emotion,

A deep trembling overwhelms me, leaves me,

From all sense and reason bereft,

Mad in your eyes.

Come to me then, Beloved, loosen me from my torment,

And wrap me sweetly in thy limbs, dewed in passion,

Consummate a mortal's yearning, and Love,

From aching flesh, set free.

And like a God, I shall die within thy lap,

Content to fall before thee, trembling,

All my heart's fullment found,

[Full within] thy [adored] grace.

The raft was not as seaworthy,

as I had hoped. The waves

repeatedly threatened

to swamp it.

I wasn't afraid to die.

I was afraid of the

emptiness

I felt inside.

I couldn't feel anything.

And that's what scared me.

You came into my thoughts.

I felt them.

It felt good.

Stay Safe.

Because I like

being alive

at the same time

as you.

The Cylons were created by man.

They evolved.

They rebelled.

They look and feel human.

Some are programmed

to think they are human.

There are many copies.

And...

They have a PLAN....

REFERENCES

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica:_The_Plan

WikiQuotes - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2003)

BSG Poetry by Fans - http://www.galacticafanfic.com/stories/bsgpoem.html

To Be Played with Poem Below:

"Caprica in Autumn" by Pat Harkin

"Caprica in Autumn"

by Pat Harkin

My fondest memory of home

Is of Caprica in autumn,

When the frost first came,

And in the mornings,

The trees were red and silver

And the grass was diamonds

And the water was a glass mirror

To the flocks above

And the air was crisp

and smelled of harvest.

My fondest memory of home

Is of Caprica in autumn

With the still-strong sun

Warming the days

And we'd run in the light

And roll through the leaves

And watch the bright birds

Who made homes in the branches

And flew through the last days of glory.

My fondest memory of home

Is of Caprica in autumn,

When the evening chill came on

As the sun went down

And the shadows crept over

The thornforest hills

And the flower colors faded

As the stars above

Came out in the sky

from a bottomless well.

My fondest memory of home

Is of Caprica in autumn...

ACTORS DISCUSS ROLES &
SERIES-ENDING THOUGHTS

Battlestar Galactica's James Callis
on How HE Wanted Baltar's Story to End 





Tricia Helfer on the end of Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica Final Episode Thoughts

"The Frackin' Best Job I Ever Had!"

Farewell Battlestar Galactica. The Journey Is Over