Old Crones | life and death in the forest
Five songs comprise The Game [of life], a song-cycle composed in the fall of 2007 out of desperation – desperation to create! Here are three…
It had been several months of hellish administrative work and a year to arrange and record my Christmas CD and book, A Season of Light. I needed to reconnect with my creative muse and these poems seemed the perfect path to that goal. All speak of the joys and sorrows of raising a family in the country and my own struggles with finding a sense of place. I was born in Texas, raised in California and then settled in New England. I call it home now. I live in the forest encircled by hundreds of acres of trees, stones, bugs and beasts.
The fifth song of The Game is about dead trees. We are surrounded by death on our daily walks in the forest. A carpet of dead leaves lies underfoot. Dry twigs crunch, torn from their mother’s branches by strong winds and ice. Logs of unknown age rot, but unlike buried humans or pets, remain visible to passersby. They are essential to the health of the forest, yet we hardly notice.
Sometimes those dead logs remain standing for decades, home to birds, beetles and bugs. The fallen ones gather moss, mushroom and mouse. They are crucial to life. Life could not live without them! They feed and nurture a wide radius of living things.
But what if that rotten log were found in downtown Manhattan? Our second son lives there with steel, glass and cement instead of green life and pale death. What a reaction he would have to see a rotten log surrounded by fern out his front door! Here is the fifth poem of the cycle.
View a PDF of the complete poetry of The Game.
Here is another old crone that gave rise to a poem that became one of my first songs in the cycle Voices in the Dark.
May we all share in the same sense of time and grace. May we accept our passing as a natural cycle, knowing our spirits will feed descendants and friends and admirers.
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