"I can feel it coming back again..."
WARNING: Today's blog entry is gonna' get kinda serious in a hurry. How serious, you ask? Well, we're talking about a song by a band called "Live," and a poem called "Child Burial" -- so one might even say that today's discussion is actually a matter of (wait for it...) life and death.
Hey, nothing like a well-placed wisecrack to keep things light before we get into all of that heavy stuff, no?
Alright, here goes:
"Lightning Crashes" ended up being the biggest radio hit of Live's career. It recounts a particularly poignant birth narrative, waxes philosophical about how life sometimes seems to move in fast-forward, and establishes a brilliant counterpoint between the sadness of watching as "an old mother dies" while at the same time celebrating the "glory" of newborn child opening its eyes at precisely the same instant.
Like I said -- it's some pretty heavy stuff.
Fun fact: "Lightning Crashes" was also one of the first songs that lead singer Ed Kowalczyk ever composed -- and he did so waaaay back when he was just a humble twenty-something living at home in his parents' house in York, Pennsylvania.
Not so fun fact: Kowalczyk and the band would later dedicate the song to Barbara Lewis, a friend of the group who was killed by a drunk driver shortly before her 20th birthday.
Not-quite-sure-if-it's-a-fun-fact-or-not: Barbara Lewis was a registered organ donor. And her death actually made it possible for a number of other individuals to receive a second chance at life. Including? A life-saving liver donation that ended up going to a ten-month old child.
Moral of the story?
"It's the circle of life."
In death, there is unavoidable sadness. But death is also an intrinsic part of the human condition. Just as that which is new must be born, so to must that which is old eventually die. True, many of these changes can be heartbreaking along the way. But sometimes (as in Barbara Lewis' case), one person's death triggers a chain reaction of events so that others might live. And in this regard, the circle continues as it always has. Or, as Kowalczyk sings:
"I can feel it coming back again / like a rollin' thunder chasin' the wind."Hey, that's actually kind of uplifting, when you put it that way.
Sometimes, however, the upshot of this whole life-and-death conundrum isn't nearly as hopeful or fleshed out. Sometimes, in fact, it seems to spin in the complete *opposite* direction.
Take, for example, "Child Burial" by the venerable Irish poet Paula Meehan:
(sadly, no relation to the blogger)
Unlike the 10-month-old organ recipient in the case of Barbara Lewis, for the subject of Meehan's poem, there was no last-minute salvation. And to that end, the poet confronts the very real (and very sad) story of the death of her infant child. Normally, I'd excerpt some highlights and sum the verse up in a sentence or two. But this one is just so freakin' well-written that it is absolutely worth the full read. Here's the first chunk of the poem:
Your coffin looked unreal,To borrow a line from Ed Kowalczyk and company, Paula Meehan can certainly "feel it coming back again," alright. But what she feels is not an inner calm or a broader sense of the circle of life unfolding as it should. Instead, it's a complete inversion of the usual course of things (e.g. -- "new" dies before "old"), so all she's left with is a world of hurt. Take a look:
fancy as a wedding cake.
I chose your grave clothes with care,
your favourite stripey shirt,
your blue cotton trousers.
They smelt of woodsmoke, of October,
your own smell was there too.
I chose a gansy of handspun wool,
warm and fleecy for you. It is
so cold down in the dark.
No light can reach you and teach youPerhaps Meehan is justified in her backwards-spinning brain here. After all, "Lightning Crashes" sings of the natural rhythm of things and a case of an old mother dying as a new child is born. But in the case of "Child Burial?" Time is out of joint (as Shakespeare might say), and the older generation is left to pick up the pieces while the new one is taken to the grave well before their time.
the paths of the wild birds,
the names of the flowers,
the fishes, the creatures.
Ignorant you must remain
of the sun and its work,
my lamb, my calf, my eaglet,
my cub, my kid, my nestling,
my suckling, my colt. I would spin
time back, take you again
within my womb, your amniotic lair,
and further spin you back
through nine waxing months
to the split seeding moment
you chose to be made flesh
word within me.
Not surprisingly, since time already seems to be unraveling in reverse, Meehan takes this chronological about-face to its logical extreme to close out her poem. Heck, she even goes as far as to say:
I'd cancel the love feastDang. Talk about someone who can "feel it coming back again," eh?
the hot night of your making.
I would travel alone
to a quiet mossy place,
you would spill from me into the earth
drop by bright red drop.
In the end, "Child Burial" talks about the circle of life spinning backwards on itself, to the point where Meehan's poem actually winds up being a direct inversion of Live's "Lightning Crashes." In the opening lines of Live's song, the life cycle proceeds according to natural order: so the song starts with a verse describing how new life is born from old death. But since "Child Burial" talks about the natural order of life unfolding in reverse? Fittingly, it is the closing lines of Meehan's poem that deal with her child's birth and conception, and thus the narrative ultimately has little choice but to end at the very last moment before the child's life even began.
Kinda' mind-blowing, no?
Well, you know what they say --
".efil fo elcric eht s'tI"
(See what I did there?)
