In the musicological journal
The tyrant’s death consumed a hundred pages.
In rivulets of blood
Ink spilled across the type face
Defouling all those Bolshevik dreams.
On page one-one-six (116)
The death of Prokofiev was noted.
How unlucky a chess gambit
How grotesque
To expire (at last)
On the same day as the fatuous tyrant.
Buffeted by history’s revenge
His hearse could not deliver him
That grand cortege.
His pall bearers (composers one and all)
Ferried his long-limbed coffin
Through the back streets
Hand in hand, beyond the heaving thrall.
Like a droll counterweight
He flowed against the tide
Against the mandatory mourning:
Unacknowledged:
Gossamer threads
Wove the spectre of his dying.
Thus, tyrants come and go
Their deeds dank and emetic
Passing through nightmares
Through rebellion and revenge
Wracked into craven decline.
Dead composers
Console us with their simpler rites.
In force majeure
Prokofiev still thrills and delights
Deft with charm and caustic wit
His inextinguishable energy
Forward bound into sweet grotesqueries.
In the power of melody
He cradled his most treasured works
Their quirkiness so filigreed
In witness of a human style
That out survives
The wretched tyrants’ hideous crimes:
Beyond the feeble coffin
He has rewritten his clangourous times.
December 2024
The tyrant’s death consumed a hundred pages.
In rivulets of blood
Ink spilled across the type face
Defouling all those Bolshevik dreams.
On page one-one-six (116)
The death of Prokofiev was noted.
How unlucky a chess gambit
How grotesque
To expire (at last)
On the same day as the fatuous tyrant.
Buffeted by history’s revenge
His hearse could not deliver him
That grand cortege.
His pall bearers (composers one and all)
Ferried his long-limbed coffin
Through the back streets
Hand in hand, beyond the heaving thrall.
Like a droll counterweight
He flowed against the tide
Against the mandatory mourning:
Unacknowledged:
Gossamer threads
Wove the spectre of his dying.
Thus, tyrants come and go
Their deeds dank and emetic
Passing through nightmares
Through rebellion and revenge
Wracked into craven decline.
Dead composers
Console us with their simpler rites.
In force majeure
Prokofiev still thrills and delights
Deft with charm and caustic wit
His inextinguishable energy
Forward bound into sweet grotesqueries.
In the power of melody
He cradled his most treasured works
Their quirkiness so filigreed
In witness of a human style
That out survives
The wretched tyrants’ hideous crimes:
Beyond the feeble coffin
He has rewritten his clangourous times.
December 2024
