You said
The dazzling colours
Hurt your eyes
The primal angst
Of all these archetypes
Fixated on revenge
Lust, patria, love
Was deeply puzzling.
Verdi slashed the canvas
With exact remembrance
Of these primitive things.
Yet
The old gypsy women
Stilled your eye
Her obsession
‘Beyond psychoanalysis’
Was palpably moving
Unlocking the terrifying human dilemma
With those echoing words:
How strange
Strano pieta –
This strange pity
Perplexing
Even to maternal love:
That in the midst of war
Within the voluptuous disorder
That grinds out fate
Enemy may spare enemy
That the exercise of free and shattering will
Might lurk
Inexorable in its logic
Beyond any Anglo-Saxon pruderies.
This Latin understands obsession
Makes its nervous system shake with propulsion
And searing melody:
Like the Sistine Chapel
With its trumpeting salvation
Trovatore may be just too febrile
For the high tea unities
That our non-Latin art forms contend.
In such a matrix
Verdi
Like Shakespeare
Leaves us speechless
Blood red
Branding our humanity
(Even my friend)
With the sharp thrust of his inexorable song.
Gar Jones: August 2012