Posts tagged: napowrimo
One
only seems
lonely.
It keeps
every prime
company.
It’s subsumed
in such
relations:
One times a prime
yields the prime’s
identity.
One times one’s
never greater
than one,
nor less,
yes, but still
not none.
Origins:
Based on this prompt: “As a result, the prompt for day one is to write a lonely poem. The narrator could be lonely. Someone or something in the poem could be lonely. Or the poem itself could try to evoke a feeling of loneliness for the reader. Or, as in challenges past, you could take the poem in a completely unique direction.”
Imagine the seven
seas drained, and
refilled by rivulets
of sound, which
deliver songs
by insubstantial waves,
not the liquid that sends
men to a gasping
farewell fancy
(chromatic fantasia)
of hallucination as
they drown.
How could we tell
if such migrant tunes,
in a half-known
tongue, sing false?
Would we hear
songs of truth, “letter
from our hearts”?
Or merely exiled heresy?
Yet music doesn’t lie,
language does. Pange
Lingua en basse [à 4],
the only truth, in its
wordlessness.
Origins: I was following this prompt and the first five songs iTunes shuffle gave me were:
Note: From what I can tell after some quick googling, Pange Lingua comes from an old Latin mass setting or chant, and means “Sing, my tongue…” or something similar. I don’t know Latin or Catholicism well. At any rate, this particular piece by Couperin is for solo organ, without words.
