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One of my favorites, seeing as some people responded positively below.
To make this musical--anyone know of any piece of music that mentions or alludes to the constellation Orion?
A SWORD IN A CLOUD OF LIGHT
Your hand in mine, we walk out
To watch the Christmas Eve crowds
On Fillmore Street, the Negro
District. The night is thick with
Frost. The people hurry, wreathed
In their smoky breaths. Before
The shop windows the children
Jump up and down with spangled
Eyes. Santa Clauses ring bells.
Cars stall and honk. Streetcars clang.
Loudspeakers on the lampposts
Sing carols, on jukeboxes
In the bars, Louis Armstrong
Plays White Christmas. In the joints
The girls strip and grind and bump
To Jingle Bells. Overhead
The neon signs scribble and
Erase and scribble again
Messages of avarice,
Joy, fear, hygiene, and the proud
Names of the middle classes.
The moon beams like a pudding.
We stop at the main corner
And look up diagonally
Across, at the rising moon,
And the solemn, orderly
Vast winter constellations.
You say, "There's Orion!"
The most beautiful object
Either of us will ever
Know in the world or in life
Stands in the moonlit empty
Heavens, over the swarming
Men, women and children, black
And white, joyous and greedy,
Evil and good, buyer and
Seller, master and victim,
Like some immense theorem,
Which, if once solved, would forever
Solve the mystery and pain
Under the bells and spangles.
There he is, the man of the
Night before Christmas, spread out
On the sky like a true god
In whom it would only be
Necessary to believe
A little. I am fifty
And you are five. It would do
No good to say this and it
May do no good to write it.
Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this savage religion
For the blood drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me.
Kenneth Rexroth
# # #
amb,
john
Follow Ups:
Saariaho...
Takemitsu...
Gustav Holst, "12 songs" (1929), #12 is titled "Betelgeuse".
I received a telescope for Christmas as well as my first Turntable, (Sound Design) so there's your musical connection. : )
There's a nebulae around Orion's belt that is smoky if you look away from it, through the lens. I was also able to find Saturn, and make out the rings.
Heady times for a 13 yo in the mid-70s.
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