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| The occasion for the ephemeral poetry--Tree of Life holiday choir concert in 2012. |
Here
today, gone tomorrow. That’s Ephemera.
Collectors of various sorts, I learn from my trusty Antiques
Road Show, use the word for material related to their main interest that
was meant to be used, viewed, and discarded.
It can be almost anything—advertising
posters, political campaign
brochures, wrapping and packaging material, old tickets or programs, baseball score
cards, war-time ration books, Ditto school worksheets. You get the idea. Items considered essentially worthless as
soon as they served their function but which become rare with time and perhaps
valuable to those with a passion for the context in which they were produced.
The
arts have ephemera, too—a cocktail
napkin with a few lines of lyric scrawled
in a moment of inspiration, a doodle by
Dali or Picasso in a note. Poets, by long standing tradition, are
often asked to dash off some piece for a particular occasion. In fact it can be a formal duty of those
tapped to be a poet laureate of this
or that. Some of these things get to be big
and important pieces, included in collections,
anthologized, and once even recited
by stammering, squirming school
children. Think Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord
Hymn read at the dedication of a battle
monument or even Maya Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning for Bill Clinton’s inauguration. But those are the exception. Most of these poems are forgotten by the time
the audience leaves the event. They were
just a frill in the program, usually a pause between the important stuff.
In
2012 Thomas Steffens, choir director at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist
Congregation in McHenry, Illinois asked me to whip up two short
verses for the annual winter holiday
choir concert. Tom is a good friend,
the concerts always of the highest quality and a highlight of the season. I was honored.
The
theme was a Holiday Concert of Poetry
and Song. The poems were to
introduce the music. I don’t do poetry
on demand very well. I struggled for a
few weeks and threw out some wretched crap.
Then one day, re-focusing on the music, the damn broke.
Below
are the two short poems. The first, The
Dark and the Light set the theme of the season and introduced the old Advent hymn, O, Come, O Come Emanuel. The second, Drums and Bells Introduced John
Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over).
Neither
stands well apart from the poem it was to introduce and the context in which it
was used—the very definition of ephemera.
But I have hauled them out of the bottom
draw, blue dust from the pages, and offer them up here on a blog page, for a moment or two of
second ephemeral glory.
The Dark and the Light
Listen! There is silence in the
wind
A dark moon rises.
We are waiting, waiting.
Waiting the poet said
for the Rebirth of Wonder,
for the fire on a
distant hill
hailing the coming of
the Light
No one told us that the Light
was not a distant
star
or even the cracking
dawn.
The Light must come from within us all.
Drums and Bells
Those are not the drums of toy soldiers
in scarlet coats and
fine high hats,
the soldiers who
never go to war
and parade to gay
music in childish dreams.
Those are the drums of real but distant war
just far enough to
almost forget,
the bass boom of the
thudding bombs,
the frantic staccato
of a flailed snare,
drums that shred and
shatter
real children’s
flesh.
Long ago as different
drums rumbled
the old
poet wrote—
I heard the bells on
Christmas Day
Their old, familiar
carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth,
good-will to men!
Can we find those
Bells again?
Can we
ring them un-bade by angels?
Can we
lend them to John and declare with him
Happy Christmas, The War is Over
and mean
it
—Patrick Murfin
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