Leonard Cohen: "Love Is Not A Victory March"

I have always loved Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

But not sung by him.

I like it sung by Rufus Wainwright, and I love it sung by Jeff Buckley.

The interpretations, though, are held together by the incredible lyric and the composition.

Something Cohen can be relied on for and why he supports covers like the gorgeous and graceful Madeleine Peyroux so successfully.

He grounds music in something so fundamental.

No bull and where its bull, its self-aware.

His lyric works hard to claim for itself a truth.

I feel nostalgia for things I haven't been through, because he talks to a feeling or a thing plainly enough to involve me.

Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen (from Leonard Cohen Live in Concert)

I've heard there was a secret chord
that David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, Do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor Fall, The major lift,
The baffled king composing, hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne
she cut your hair and from your lips she drew the halleujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Maybe I've been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

There was a time you let me know
What's real and going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

I've Come To Take You Home

Driving through the beauty of Nature's Valley today, re-visiting a home of my own, I heard Diana Ferrus read her moving poem to Sarah Baartman on local radio.

A poem for Sarah Baartman
By Diana Ferrus

“I’ve come to take you home –
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away –
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white –
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.”

Where Do You Go To My Lovely?

Peter Sarstedt
Top of The Pops
1969

Also featured in the excellent Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson), 2007.

Clowns (Electric Proms '08)

Goldfrapp

Gathering Mushrooms

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,

but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
 In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-

 he could barely tell one from the other-

and why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

*

He looked about. He remembered her palaver
on how both earth and sky would darken-
'You could barely tell one from the other'-

while the Monarch butterflies passed over
in their milkweed-hunger: 'A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.'
Then: 'Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other.'

*

He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.
He'd mistaken his mother's name, 'Regan, ' for Anger';
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

Paul Muldoon

After Me Comes The Flood

Regina Spektor

I Am In Need Of Music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
                               A song to fall like water on my head,
                               And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop

Bon Iver Live On Jools Holland

Bellwood

She drives past bulls behind fences
to reach the cottages that
sit primly at the water’s edge.

Purple flowers adorn the dry hillside,
amethysts around a sun-burnt neck.

A pin oak extends delicately
towards the sky. Horses mull.

Earlier, on the open road her car flanked a train
as it probed the landscape, like a man entering a woman.

On her stereo, Alanis Morisette’s lyrics blare
‘this is in praise of the vulnerable man.’
The words summon his face like an avatar:
sad clear eyes, thin-lipped mouth, jutting nose
swimming up in her mind like insistent fish.

Hours later, drunk, she leaves the birthday party,
to walk to where she will sleep that night
and lies on her bed, listening to the sounds of frogs
calling out across the water.
Laughter floats in through her open window,
like a half-drawn breath.

She remembers his words about her poems:
earnest, direct, removed.
Offering structure, a skeleton beneath flesh.

She scrawls in her notebook as a swimmer, fearful, under water
might search the opacity for something recognisable.
She writes tentatively, as one standing up, walking to shore
might feel mud and soft lake moss beneath her feet, yielding.

Sarah Frost
http://writinginto.wordpress.com

Dream Song 1: Huffy Henry Hid The Day

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

John Berryman

Walking

It is the middle of a morning by the lake.
I have come outside to sneak a childish cigarette
and am grateful alone
in the strengthening sun.

You want to go walking up a hill that sits
solid outpost,
flanking our holiday territory.

I want to walk,
to move my muscles in the cool and feel
the country against flesh and hair.

You look me stranger in the eye and declare the pace.
I leave myself down at the water’s edge.

Five brisk minutes along the flat red runway
and I am already playground panting: impossible.
Your calves tighten in strict half-moons
pumping the unstoppable machinery of your distance
into the stones and the rocks and the gathering dust.

Mandy Leontakianakis
November 2008

Delicate

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Paul Muldoon On Political Poetry and The Hazards of Writing A Daily Poem

Haircut

Cigarettes

I remember when I was afraid of cigarettes:
the certainty that each one was killing
my father.
It was my struggle to make him see,
that they would take him
from me.

He stopped for seven years,
until his father died.
The news delivered too-loud
in a phone call from Greece.
Dad shouting to cover the distance:
he was so far from home.

He sat alone in our sun room that night,
listening to Theodorakis and crying.
A black and white photograph of my gandfather
and a brass ashtray at his side.
Fine smoke coated his vigil.

I tried to smoke fashionable cigarettes:
slim, white menthol fingers
redeeming my minutes
while I grappled with myself at the sea.

It took a year for the tobacco to take hold.
for the deep pull to reach my lungs
and soar into my brain.

A sacredness in my
pocket of personal smoke.

I tried to stop smoking
when a man said
it separated me from him.
And me from God.
For him I could be
a piece of nature.
A breath of fresh air.

I find smoking places: secret
on a narrow windowsill,
knees girlish close to my chest.
On a deep verandah,
starless quiet.
Before anyone else is awake:
gathering words for the day.
After everyone else is asleep:
remembering
and forgetting.



Mandy Leontakianakis
November 2008