Der Ring des Nibelungen - Richard Wagner

 

The Mountain Wreath - Christmas Eve

 (Gun-shots are heard below. Vladika Danilo jumps on
his horse and rides off; and, lo! down the field are five
or six hundred men; he spurs on his horse to reach them.
On his arrival they gather round him. The Vladika, seeing
five of the Martinovitch family, Vuk Borilovitch, and three
of his servants blood-sprinkled, begins to question them.)

 

VLADIKA DANILO

Relate me now! Say what hath taken place;
What kind of men are ye - or wolves or foxes?
 

VOIVODA BATRITCH

The news is nought but good, my lord!
We bow the knee to God and to the Holy Child!
But first of all we give thee Christmas Greetings,
To thee and to all Montenegro!
We brothers five of clan Martinovitch,
And servants three of thine - most trusty three -
With Borilovitch-Vuk, the falcon-hearted,
Did last night fall a-fighting with the Turks.
All those who heard ran fast unto our help;
As quick as water fighters ran together; -
But why do I spin out the story? -
Though broad enough Cettigné’s Plain,
No single seeing eye, no tongue of Turk,
Escap’d to tell his tale another day!
We put them all unto the sword,
All those who would not be baptiz’d;
But who paid homage to the Holy Child
Were all baptiz’d with sign of Christian Cross,
And as brother each was hail’d and greeted.
We put to fire the Turkish houses,
That there might be nor stick nor trace
Of these true servants of the Devil!
From Cettigné to Tcheklitche we hied,
There in full flight the Turks espied;
A certain number were by us mow’d down,
And all their houses we did set ablaze;
Of all their mosques both great and small
We left but one accursèd heap,
For passing folk to cast their glance of scorn.
 

VLADIKA DANILO

Great gladness this for me, my falcons,
Great joy for me! Heroic liberty
Has resurrection morn to-day,
From every tomb of our ancestors dear!

Petar II Petrovic Njegos

Kurt Vonnegut - Palm Sunday / Playmates

"THE Class of '57" could be an anthem for my generation, at least. Many people have said that we already have an anthem, which is my friend Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which starts off like this:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed

by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets

at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient

heavenly connection to the starry dynamo

in the machinery of night.

And so on.

I like "Howl" a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.

No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first—and after that biochemistry.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

...   

    But Billy Pilgrim wasn't beguiled by the back of the store. He was thrilled by the Kilgore Trout novels in the front. The titles were all new to him, or he thought they were. Now he opened one. It seemed all right for him to do that. Everybody else in the store was pawing things. The name of the book was The Big Board. He got a few paragraphs into it, and then realized that he had read it before—years ago, in the veterans' hospital. It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials.They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212. 

    These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market, quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they returned to Earth. 

    The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo—to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms. 

    The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl. 

It worked. Olive oil went up.

...

Yağmur

 

Memo From the Cave - Louise Glück

O love, you airtight bird,

My mouse-brown

Alibis hang upside-down

Above the pegboard

With its dangled pots

I don't have chickens for;

My lies are crawling on the floor

Like families but their larvae will not

Leave this nest. I've let

Despair bed

Down in your stead

And wet

Our quilted cover

So the rot-

scent of its pussy-foot-

ing fingers lingers, when it's over.

Catalogue - Donika Kelly

You think about being small,

a child. No. Smaller,

a bird. Smaller still,

a small bird. You think

about the art of holding,

of being held. This hand

Can crush you. Pulp and feather you. Could release the air from all your little bones.

You grow. You are large.

You are a 19th century poem.

All of America is inside you,

a catalogue of lives and land

and burrowing things. You contain

your beloved: a field, a building

of softening wood. The birds.

Always. The Birds.

Soon you will be a person. Nothing

will change. Your body will be of a piece

with all other bodies: the thrush,

the dormouse, the great black bear.

When you open your mouth,

there will be only air.

Tighten your throat. Sound, 

inexplicably, like something lost.