Just Dont Like Requiems

Good afternoon.

I am watching the end of Amadeus, where, dying, Mozart is pushing out of himself with his dying gasps his wonderful Requiem--in C, is it? Don't remember. It's magnificent.

But I dont like requiems.  I just refuse to go to any, any more.  Perhaps it's because  to me they are a requiem for a civilization that has gone to the dogs, through stupidity and cupidity and greed at all levels.  I know; that is very depressed and negative thinking. So I don't think that way too much; I don't let myself think it.  I think of other things like animals, farms, music, all arts, books and reading, of food and cookery, some little bit of religion . I think of the goodness of Mexicans I have known,  and that of some Americans (fewer).  When I think of religion I think of Christianity as personified by the Episcopal Church, and how,even if it is all just a made up myth, what a fantastic myth it is, what a fantastic creation.  Perhaps we made it up for our own consolation, or our own vindication, or our own--castigation.  Nowadays, it doesn't work for that last phrase because the word from Above as I last heard it was that we were all already forgiven before we were born. We can't even commit our own sins nor suffer for them.  Wait a minute--I am going too far.  Better stop and go back to animals.

The other night I saw a beautiful special on whales. They are so fascinating.  It is a bizarre thing to feel sympathy for a brother or sister whose eye, alone, is bigger than one's whole person.  But there they were capering around in the ocean as free as birds, living life on such a large scale that it's hard to imagine that life. I wrote a poem about whales a long time ago, and here it is.

          Sometimes at night I cannot sleep
          Until I think of whales..
          Out in the wet and dark and cold,
          Rolling with the Grace of God
          In vast and frigid cradles of the waves.

          If there is a moon they're watching it.
         Their blood is warm,
         And oh, so long ago they left safe earth,
         Dryness, and the comfort of warm snuggling,
         The usefulness of arms and hands
         To touch and work for one--
         Their little ones bob at their sides,
          Never to be grasped. 
        
          And the vast awe I feel at their bravery
          In that tremendous dark water
          Sends me off to sleep.

That is a very corny and incompleted poem but  I have not seen fit to change it since 10-7-79 which is the date I wrote it on.  Of course it didn't say one tenth of what I wanted to express, but it's all true anyway.  YAZZYBEL