Clouded in
Ruddy faces, gossip, ale or mead, stormy night: content, complacency, a chuckle of delight and suspense, spice of fear, mud clinging without, thunder beating around brick mansions, trellising ivy. Content or complacency? One is begotten from hard work or easy conscience, the other begets idleness and uneasy conscience. Which one do the listeners to the fireplace tales carry in their breasts? How do they sleep and on what their dreams grist and glisten?
Tomorrow, the clouds will roll away, buds will burst forth from the earth, and no one to toil them, nor to gather their embrace. For here, now, in the black night, that night so well and so profusely punctuated by electric strikes, in that fathomless pit, which farmer and baker both dread, the peeping faces from hanging pots, from rough wooden beams, from every thud of an empty tankard waiting to be filled, all those hideous and angelic faces peer at you and grow within you, as rain and fog smuggle to your soul though you may well believe yourself well sheltered.
There is no song, nor battlecry, nor revelry even. There is but the tale, told in a crackling voice, with gasps of those who listen as rejoinders, and an occasional "Eh?", a "Say you so?", a perfunctory call for a drink more, a distrustfully friendly nudge to your nervous neighbour. The old man in the centre keeps spinning, prolonging for not mere better effect, but his own better enjoyment. His is not the 15 seconds of fame, but of every such night when they demand him, and those others when they recall those words even if far away from his yarn. Yes, for that is how intelligence gleams, first in shadowed tapestries, gleaming in chinks, not as splendid suns of the glorious blue sky. But then, it is up to each man, what path he chooses: content or complacency?
The old man will keep going.
(inspired by Dickens)
Tomorrow, the clouds will roll away, buds will burst forth from the earth, and no one to toil them, nor to gather their embrace. For here, now, in the black night, that night so well and so profusely punctuated by electric strikes, in that fathomless pit, which farmer and baker both dread, the peeping faces from hanging pots, from rough wooden beams, from every thud of an empty tankard waiting to be filled, all those hideous and angelic faces peer at you and grow within you, as rain and fog smuggle to your soul though you may well believe yourself well sheltered.
There is no song, nor battlecry, nor revelry even. There is but the tale, told in a crackling voice, with gasps of those who listen as rejoinders, and an occasional "Eh?", a "Say you so?", a perfunctory call for a drink more, a distrustfully friendly nudge to your nervous neighbour. The old man in the centre keeps spinning, prolonging for not mere better effect, but his own better enjoyment. His is not the 15 seconds of fame, but of every such night when they demand him, and those others when they recall those words even if far away from his yarn. Yes, for that is how intelligence gleams, first in shadowed tapestries, gleaming in chinks, not as splendid suns of the glorious blue sky. But then, it is up to each man, what path he chooses: content or complacency?
The old man will keep going.
(inspired by Dickens)
posted by ankyuk at
12:37 am
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