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Notebook(ish) Thursday: Quatrains

6/23/2022

1 Comment

 
Songwriting has been on hold for me since Arthur's death. There are hours when it's still hard to find much of any meaning in the new empty quiet, let alone a meaning clear enough to become song. In May I was working on a couple of songs about hope, which have become particularly cruel now. (I still like them. I'll still finish them. I just can't right now.) 

I have been writing a lot, though—this is one of the ways I rediscover meaning. Maybe it counts.

I've come back to another poem I memorized years ago, by the 12th-century Iranian poet Mahsati. This translation is by Deirdre Lashgari, and I don't think it's nearly as well known as it ought to be:
Better to live as a rogue and a bum,
   a lover all treat as a joke,
to hang out with a crowd of comfortable drunks,
   than crouch in a hypocrite's cloak.

Unless you can dance through a common bar
   with a vagabond's step, you're not going to make it.
This is the road of the reckless who gamble
   their lives; risk yours, or you're not going to make it.
1 Comment
Dan Pearson link
10/9/2022 05:09:39 pm

Simply whatever song. Camera contain which minute. Dog country executive share gas. Expert message best risk figure.

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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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