[New-Poetry] from the Writer's Almanac

[Anny Ballardini]

Poem: "Regarding (Most) Songs" by Thomas Lux, from The Street of Clocks. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

Regarding (Most) Songs 

        Whatever is too stupid to say
        can be sung.
                  -JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

The human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
It trills a string of banal words,
but your blood jumps, regardless. You don't care
about the words but only how they're sung
and the music behind - the brass, the drums.
Oh the primal, necessary drums
behind the words so dumb!
That power, the bang and the boom and again the bang
we cannot, need not, live without,
nor without other means to make sweet noise,
the guitar or violin, the things that sing
the plaintive, joyful sounds.
Which is why I like songs best
when I can't hear the words, or, better still,
when there are no words at all.


Thomas Lux


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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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