Of Silence and Song. Dan Beachy-Quick
carried off by a wolf from the very midst of the camp. And in the case of Hannibal, many unknown wild beasts went before him leading the way, as he was crossing the Iberus, and a vision appeared to him in a dream. He thought once that the gods, sitting in assembly, sent for him and bade him march with all speed to Italy and receive from them a guide for the way, and that by this guide he was commanded to follow without turning around. He did turn, however, and saw a great tempest moving along and an immense serpent following in its wake.
Other examples:
“A hermaphrodite lamb was born, and a swarm of . . . was seen, two serpents glided under the doors of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, the doors as well as the altar in the temple of Neptune ran with copious sweat, in Antium bloody ears were seen by some reapers, elsewhere a woman with horns appeared and many thunderbolts . . . into temples . . .”
Plutarch records “that shields sweated blood, that ears of corn were cut at Antium with blood upon them, that blazing, fiery stones fell from on high, and that the people of Falerii saw the heavens open and many tablets fall down and scatter themselves abroad, and that on one of these was written in letters plain to see, ‘Mars now brandisheth his weapons.’”
Lastly, and oddly, a favorite, after the death of Scipio Africanus:
“And this in particular seems to me to have been the meaning of the mass of stones that had poured down from heaven, falling upon some of the temples and killing men, and of the tears of Apollo. For the god had wept for three days, so that the Romans on the advice of the soothsayers voted to hew the statue in pieces to sink it in the sea.”
The ocean that is made of tears and in its grieving wears the stone away.
The god of prophecy crying while the stonecutters cut him limb from limb to throw the severed stones into the sea.
Some fear far above the clouds. That there is a weight there waiting to fall. That the gods etch in clouds as on stones the messages that might rain down. That a tempest rains down a library. That a book cracks open a head.
Is it omen when the world begins to speak for itself, long weary of being spoken of or for. The passive voice refuses its position. The accusative wants to accuse. That old contract by which the names name the things of the world rests on a secret agreement that those things keep silent. But then a shield begins to bleed, a statue cry, a vulture presides over Law, and language doesn’t work the right way anymore. It doesn’t describe what it names. It does different work. It beseeches. Then the words that come out our mouths beg the things we name to tell us what they mean.
A child in the moonlight looking up at the moon cups her hands around her ears.
O Cannae, Cannae!
There sings all around me in my ears the song I cannot listen to hear.
Iris once told me that we have to close our eyes at night when we go to sleep so that the darkness doesn’t get in our heads.
I said, “But when we close our eyes it’s dark.”
“That’s a different kind of dark, Daddy. Everyone knows that.”
Hana when she was only two, putting her to bed for the night, rocking her to sleep, says with her eyes closed, already in dream: “A cricket in the desert, a cricket in the desert.”
Now she puts her headphones on and closes her eyes; no one else can hear the cricket’s song.
Some Animal Poems for Children to Learn and Sing
The Golden Age
Then the animals could talk in words.
The sparrow to the farmer sang
and the farmer sang along,
the pine and the laurel counseled
the honey in its tomb to sing a tune,
and the bees agreed with the deities
that the flowers perfumed the muse
and made prophecy the deeper root.
The Lion and the Bow
The fox pulled the arrow out
from the lion’s belly,
and told him to feel no fear.
“If this messenger stung you,
Fox, as it stung me, you’d see
courage snares the heart,
binds the foot, blinds the eye.
Better to live in the lonely glen
than be a brave fool and die.”
The Net and the Fish
The big ones stay in
and the little ones swim,
what’s glory in a frying-pan
compared to the living fin?
The Horse and the Ass
The burden you refuse
becomes the weight you bear,
the horse that scorned the ass
wears the whole pack
he refused to share.
The Fox on Fire
To punish the thief of the vines,
the farmer dipped in tallow the tail
and lit it on fire. But the fox in his fear
ran straight through the fields.
Now the threshing floor has no piled grain,
and the crop is cinder and ash.
The Nightingale and the Swallow
By singing in the dark the same song
They recognized each other—
The nightingale and the swallow.
“Come live with me under the eaves
and lessen with song the load of men
who till the earth to live.” “My song
is a torment I sing alone, the desert rock
echoes it, and the morning dew that cures
thirst is now my humble home.”
Some poems of Sappho’s found in the winding cloth around the body found in the sarcophagus. A poem of Catallus’s printed on thick vellum found, claret-stained, plugging the bunghole of a tun of wine. Ancient manuscripts discovered in bookshelves kept in tombs, reading for the afterlife, there with the jars of sealed honey and the mirrors of polished