I’ve mentioned my first experience of singing with the Fragments Project in Hawick and now it’s time to continue cataloguing my more recent collaboration with it in Jedburgh, through the mixed medium of preamble and poem!
(This is a digression: Actually, just typing that makes me realise the effect my research on Dante has seeped into my blogging enterprise… Both his Vita Nuova – the narrative of his love for Beatrice – and his Convivio – a philosophical treatise – are constructed from prose stories and commentaries around poems. That literary model is called prosimetrum and I appear to have accidentally slipped into it. Anyway, back to the preamble).
I was taking part in the first performance of Seán Doherty‘s ‘Et clamabant’, a piece written in response to the music in the Hawick Missal, at an event in Jedburgh Old and Trinity Church and in the ruins of Jedburgh Abbey. I’ve written a longer piece about the experience for the project blog, but for now, here’s a poem that came out of the evening:
Jedburgh Abbey
glass fallen from the windows
ground by weather
allowed now
in through emptinesses
unglazed with everchanging stain
a membrane hard not to imagine
and outside remains
resolutely
out
if only in the persistence of window frames
if only in the voices
passed between the pillars
if only in the north wall
which half remembers holding back
the crush of sweating life
of trade and cattle profane chatter
of courting and wedding and begetting
if only in the song
if only in perception
unconvinced by the openness to atmosphere
reminding the wallstones that they belong
to the water
to the winds
to the gentle corruptions of time
to the still resounding sky
I had some formatting issues with this poem, if anyone has any tips on indenting lines and keeping the indents from the draft to the published post?
I loved reading this poem. Now I wonder what walking around Rome will lead you to write.
Thanks, so far I’ve only managed some silly lines about a gecko, but hopefully the muses will be a bit less petrified than the ones in the Capitoline museum!