Olivier Messiaen, Starlings and Mozart, Baby

 

Olivier Messiaen

From dawn’s chorus an hundred

melodies spring; out of universal fineness,

like dew, a million worlds are shaping themselves,

each day, anew. Who teaches the chorus to sing?

It must be transience,

declaring its passing presence.

 

 

Starlings and Mozart

 

Trees absorb them, where they chatter,

these handsome immigrants

in classy cloths.

 

In January skies, with tropical songs

and traffic noise in busy beaks, they electrify

dormant gardens with perplexing din.

 

Informed by a flawless field where

all are one, starlings on the wing

are corps de ballet at extreme velocity.

Clustering, darkening, dispersing,

thrumming,

they are fashioned of invisible quicksilver.

 

Tracing their flight, reeling from a surfeit

of sky gazing,

it becomes clear why they enthralled Mozart.

 

He too capered in counterpoint, cavorting

on cascading wings, then

fly-pasts, switch-backs, and suspensions.

 

Surely, both are angelic translators

of messages

from the ultimate to the mundane.

 

 

Baby

 

In time before time, separating forward from

backward the original split in the fabric of

eternity spawned innumerable couplets,

made songs, clapped hands, played tag.

 

Of sentience we are born, mouths belonging

to our breast, absolutely, unquestionably.

We all had gappy grins, delighting

our mothers and insuring continuity of care.

Individuality began with teeth, hunger-pangs,

and the stark reality of biting power

testing unconditional love. Then the ultimate

disillusionment: the weaning!

 

Not only was ego spurred into being,

but also desiring the world with bestial gluttony,

growing so huge that shrunken planet, although

filling infinite belly, could never satisfy.

 

Next to threats of starvation were sown

seeds of ambiguity. What is death,

separating forward from backward,

but life come to scare the shit out of you?

 

By Misha Norland