From the lark to the nightingale

Okay, we’re going to take a bit of a turn for today’s earworm. A turn to imperial Vienna, where in 1882 Johann Strauss the Younger wrote an orchestral waltz celebrating Spring. “Frühlingsstimmen” (“Voices of Spring”) actually sounds to me like a frolic in a green field, and that’s even without the coloratura soprano added in.

(I find it rather amusing that the first soprano to sing it was Bertha Schwartz, whose stage name was Bianca Bianchi.)

Here we’ve got Kathleen Battle singing it. Open your windows and let this flow all around you.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Welcome, May!

Let’s celebrate May Day with some views of Spring in the People’s Republic.

A couple of weeks ago, I was forced into a detour from my normal walking path because some golfer parked his cart across the bridge over a creek that runs through the course. I confess that I was grumbling, but then look who flew over to say hello:

Here's someone I met on another walk:

And here is a beautiful shrub I’m unacquainted with, but it gave me joy throughout April:

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

The darkness drops again

When William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, the world was still picking up the pieces after four years of total war, and was awash in the global influenza pandemic. But here we are, more than a hundred years on, and it feels like it describes the past 100 days entire.

I don’t know what more I can say about it. Except that it closes out National Poetry Month for 2025, and it’s up to us to deal with that rough beast.

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

The awful grace of God.

We know Aeschylus as a tragedian and a poet, but he was also a soldier—veteran of the battles of Marathon (against Darius I) and Salamis (against Xerxes). So even when he wrote of mythical wars and warriors, he drew on his own experiences and knew what he was talking about.

The characters in Aeschylus’ plays are not, on the whole, happy. This is particularly true of the Oresteia trilogy, focusing on the family of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, one of the leaders in the Greek war against Troy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, everything we know about Agamemnon (starting with Homer’s Iliad) tells us that he’s a complete shit: arrogant, boastful, bullying, petty, inflexible and greedy. Yes, he came from an unhappy family (the House of Atreus), and there was that curse, but still—he really got up my nose when I was reading the classics.

Agamemnon is not the sort of guy who engages in introspection, and his ego prevents him from ever learning. This is a serious flaw, particularly in a head of state. And it leads to his violent murder, followed by the destruction of his family.

The observation about wisdom emerging from pain that Aeschylus makes in Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, was not absorbed by the title character. Big cheeses typically don’t take instruction from poets. But these lines were chosen by Robert F. Kennedy in April, 1968, when he announced to the citizens of Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

God, whose law it is
that he who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our will,
comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Here’s video of Kennedy's speech that day.

The delta between RFK and his eldest son is just beyond measure. Junior, like everyone else in this administration, does not learn, possesses no wisdom and live above suffering.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Every morning a new arrival

This is a National Poetry Month of resistance, but it also encompasses persistence and resilience. All three of these things are long plays. As much as we’d like to see our oppressors turned to dust with the flick of a wrist, the reality is that they didn’t arrive here suddenly, and it’s going to take time and considerable effort to boot them out and clean up after them.

I, in particular, need to remember this, because I am the most impatient person on the planet. I need to remind myself continually that—ghastly as this administration and its illegalities and cruelties are, and as much as we need to clear them away—just because I can’t snap my fingers and turn them all into dust beside the road while real wounds are healed, that doesn’t mean that the battle (much less the war) is lost.

We need to refresh ourselves from time to time. Meditate, be mindful; rest and recuperate.

So, for Gratitude Monday, let’s have something from the 13^th Century Persian poet we know as Rumi. “The Guest House” is very frequently quoted during mindfulness retreats, so it seems appropriate for today. It reminds us to invite into our lives and souls dark things as well as light, because everything—every thing—has something to teach us. And—I hope—to make us stronger for the necessary.

“The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Unconquerable soul

When you think of people who’ve played the long game, who’ve showed steadfast courage and a generosity of spirit despite the most despicable treatment from their oppressors, I believe you would not cast about too long before you spoke the name of Nelson Mandela.

In the course of his revolutionary leadership in the struggle against apartheid, Mandela was denounced as a terrorist and spent 27 years in prison, before being released in 1992 and becoming the first black president of South Africa. As we are seeing today with the white male base of the Kleptocrat’s supporters, the attempts by the Afrikaners who had held power since the days of the Dutch settlements became more and more repressive with every successive wave of black African refusal to live as second class citizens in their own land. And Mandela was the most visible representation of the African National Congress.

One of his many remarkable qualities was his refusal to carry the terrible weight of bitterness or revenge—he could certainly be remorseless, but he was not vindictive. Even though he certainly had real, personal cause for grievance.

The poem “Invictus”, is the best-known work of the Victorian poet William E. Henley. It certainly encapsulates the Victorian mantra of maintaining the stiff upper lip, but also includes that kind of, well, master-of-fate mentality that formed the backbone of the British Empire. You really do have to have an underpinning of a complete belief in yourself in order to conquer, occupy and govern peoples literally around the world.

That belief also helps if you’re going to lead the resistance to the kind of oppression that people like the Kleptocrat, and the Bothas dish out.

And “Invictus” (Latin for, essentially, “unbroken”; literally, “unconquered”) was a touchstone for Mandela during his imprisonment. It has also served the same purpose for Aung San Suu Kyi, and American POWs held by the North Vietnamese, so it could do so for us, too.

“Invictus”

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu