Fathersong I. For Sofia Celestia

In the morning light. Inverloch, September 1988

For the past three years we have, as a family, dispensed with giving each other purchased gifts at Christmas - apart from the grandchildren of course. We have instead exchanged artful representations, such as drawings, collages, symbolic portrayals of each other. This year, much to the delight of those of us less adept in the skills of line and colour, the nature of our offerings has been extended to include songs, stories and poems. 

Fathersong is my Christmas offering to our younger daughter, Sofia. It offers a poetic account of her remarkable entry into our lives on a star-filled night three decades ago, and is a celebration of her strength and courage in the face of life's unexpected visitations.




Fathersong. For Sofia Celestia can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file can be downloaded here.

Production Notes

Harmonic backing track
Nico Di Stefano
Vincent Di Stefano

"Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885

THE POEM

Fathersong
For Sofia Celestia

What is it then, to change our worlds, to leave the crimson field
That glows behind thin eyelids closed?
Depart the smooth-walled cave that yields and bends
With each new flexing, each new turning?

When that first wave washed gently through the living room
From which your first breath would be drawn,
Your mother gathered cloths and candles.
I took some rest in preparation.

Your angel knocked and drew my thread towards the now-clear door.
Such strength, such depth of presence held her there.
And as I fascinated walked, the dream-thread snapped
And I awoke, my body all electric thrilling.

What is it then, to change our worlds, to knock upon already-open doors?
Your mother's door now open wide, but we alone.
The midwife's skill behind the wheel in former days
Fast spun her to our doorstep

And moments later, there emerged your wondrous, tiny baby face.
Well-practiced hands revealed the living twine that held you fast.
With one swift cut, and cord uncoiled, then free you slid
To waiting hands and wondrous murmurs.

Soft song of welcome sprung from smiling lips, filling breasts.
We marvelled all that bright-star night
Then woke anew in father's day,
In miracle of family way.

What is it then, to change our worlds, from innocence of childhood days
To number and weight of fuller years with all they hold and carry?
We live within a greater dream and range beyond familiar ground
To tread old paths undreamed and unexpected.

(And though that greater dream be hid from sight and sense
It beckons on to paths ne'er seen before, yet strangely known.)

To walk the mountain trail with clouds below is given to but few,
Yet this your courage did embrace and overcome.
The tempest came. The tempest passed, and back on level ground again,
The time invites a softer step, invokes a gentler course.

Remember this. Our words like seeds will often dormant lie
And seasons turn according to their time.
But where the soil is rich, the soul brings forth a great abundance,
The promise of its birth, the promise of its ceaseless striving.

Your soil is rich in strength of heart and mind.
Your sky is clear when to those heights you reach again.
Your self well formed in love and overcoming.
Your angel ever-present through your days.

RELATED POSTS

1. In Search of the Deeper Healing

"The healing intention has taken many forms throughout history. It has been voiced in the prayers and invocations of countless generations of priests and shamans. It has been carried by the men and women who sought out the substances present in nature and those produced by human ingenuity that help to ease the pain of sickness and hasten the return of health. It continues to find expression in the skill and precision of those dedicated surgeons who daily exercise their art."
(Introduction: "Holism and Complementary Medicine. History and Principles", 2006)

2. Canto Celeste

This earlier Dante's Ghost post reflects further on a number of the themes touched upon in Fathersong.

3. After the Tempest (Finding Family)

This short poem builds on a personal reflection on the nature of enduring relationship during a time characterised by the prevalence of divided households.

The poem carries an acknowledgement of the tensions and the difficulties that inevitably arise within the context of marriage while also giving voice to the deeper treasures that can emerge in the living out of a sustained commitment to another.

Dancing Dust. The Song of a Dying Warrior

This original performance piece brings together both shamanic and Taoist insights. It offers a reflection on earlier perspectives that viewed the microcosm of the individual and the macrocosm of the world as being intimately connected.

One of the more obvious characteristics of the present age is the dominance of highly destructive technologies. Bombs of devastating power can be remotely "delivered" across thousands of kilometres. The furious energies within the atomic nucleus can be both constrained and unleashed at will.

Yet the world is moved by more than technologically mediated power. This has ever been understood by the poet, the prophet, the saint and the shaman.



Dancing Dust. The Song of a Dying Warrior can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality file is available here.

Production Notes

Music:
B.O. Rasch (Asaguare):   Peyoth Aluz

Effects:
Rhapsodize: Crickets (Freesound)
nicStage: F-16 Flyby (Freesound)
ryansnook: Nuclear Explosion (Freesound)
Erdie: Mega-Thunder (Freesound)

Voice:
Vincent Di Stefano

Ivy Mike Thermonuclear Fireball, Enewetak Atoll, 1952

The Poem

Dancing Dust. The Song of a Dying Warrior

We stood in the light of day
Now we sit in the darkening night
Awaiting simple presence
And a return to the very moment

From this small cell
The day seems too hard driven
By those of might and power

But listen still

Soft footsteps fall upon the dust
And stir a gentle storm
That slowly gathers force

And as the drums beat louder still
The soft footfall more fierce becomes

The earth can shake when men do dance
And call upon the Hidden One
As surely as it heaves and quakes
When atoms fuse and atoll breaks

Beat the drum my stalwart men
And fill the night with pulse and promise
Bring to heel the sacred force
Bring to hand the living light

Sing the song and dance the story
Call the tune and turn the earth

Expanding the Poetic Field. From Ford Madox Hueffer to Kate Tempest

I have for many years now held a deep fascination for Ford Madox Hueffer's Antwerp, a poem as little known as the man himself, a poem written in 1915 that vividly recreates the horror of the war fields of Europe during the so-called Great War and the even greater horror of mothers waiting at Charing Cross station for sons who would never return.

Antwerp ostensibly gives voice to both the mythic heroism and the wanton sacrifice of Belgian soldiers who, supported by British and French troops, instrumentally obstructed the German advance towards France in the latter months of 1914. In this unparalleled poem, Heuffer succeeded in accomplishing within himself what a short two years earlier he had sought to activate in other poets:

"Modern life is so ordinary, so hazy, so tenuous, with still such definite and concrete spots in it, that I am forever on the look-out for some poet who shall render it with all its values. I do not think that there was ever, as the saying is, such a chance for a poet. . . . . I am aware that I can do nothing, since with me the writing of verse is not a conscious art. It is the expression of an emotion, and I can so often not put my emotions into any verse. . . . I have been unable to do it; I am too old perhaps or was born too late - anything you like. But there it is. . ."

Soon after writing this lamentation, the harrowed and harrowing Antwerp poured out of his quill in a gesture that revealed that one is perhaps never too old, that one is perhaps never born too late. What came between Hueffer's short essay Impressionism - Some Speculations (from which the above quotation is drawn) and Antwerp was, of course, the war. And the anguish, the pain, and the senselessness of it unleashed torrents of emotion within him that washed aside all poetic conventions. They brought forth what T.S. Eliot was later to describe as "the only good poem I have met with on the subject of the war."

Hueffer's essay is an unlikely and generally unacknowledged manifesto that called for the transformation of poetic expression from the occasionally elegant (and often pretentious) formalism that characterised much of the poetry of his day:

"For a quarter century, I have kept before me one unflinching aim - to register my own times in terms of my own time, and still more to urge those who are better poets and better prose-writers than myself to have the same aim."

Heuffer called for a movement of the waters of poetry into the stream of life itself, into the messiness of urban realities, the tenuousness of human relationships, the irruption of chaos into history. He urged the attention of poets to be re-directed to the ordinary, to the under-stated, to the over-looked, to the vulgarised, to the ever-present:

"Love in country lanes, the song of birds, moonlight - these the poet, playing for safety, and the critic trying to find something safe to praise, will deem the sure cards of the poetic pack. They seem the safe things to sentimentalise over, and it is taken for granted that sentimentalising is the business of poetry. It is not, of course."

T.S. Eliot's epochal poem The Waste Land, where the ordinary and the extraordinary are interwoven as a fractured mosaic mirroring the profusion and the diffusion of early modernity, seemed to arrive on the scene soon after as a direct response to Hueffer's call.

As the moral and structural decay of industrial/technological civilisation began to manifest ever more strongly in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the poetic spirit quickened with a greater urgency and a greater poignancy in the chthonic tribalism of hip-hop artists who spoke life as it is lived both at ground level and within the elevated towers of corporate and political meddling.

If Ford Maddox Hueffer were a young man today, he would probably be completely at home among the courageous and energised hip-hop poets who call it as it is in all its pathos and all its passion.

One such poet is Kate Tempest, who in her powerful piece Europe is Lost, howls as a storm through the chaos and the excess of this time of troubles. The video clip below offers a dramatic portrayal of what not only Europe, but much of the rest of the so-called civilised world has become.