The Black Sheep, by Joanna Newsom

T’was a humdrum, cloud-bespotted day
Rumblesome skies unfurled, turbid and grey
And the air was charged with smoke, was charged with sulphur and with hay
As I tripped like a sea-washed shingle down yon rocky terrain

The whippoorwill cawed slyly in the sighing willow trees
And the long grass heaved with the bulk of the breeze
And as it blew, it grew, and drew toward my feet, toward my knees
So I hummed like a mariner; chanted my larky, garbled refrain

And as to pick some dandelions and mint and sage I knelt
I chanced upon a woe-behobbled beast, upon whose charcoal pelt
The brunt of weather and of hunger was sorely felt
I asked him whence his wool had gone, and sadly he did explain:

“Aye sir, nay sir – I do shiver verily to tell
This coat of mine, my garment, my friend, was taken for to sell,
By my master and his cruel dame, and the little boys who dwell
In the crumble-down cottage, down the honeysuckle lane”

We cleft our ways; I watched the path he took
As he limped amongst the poplar shadows, by the stagnant, mellow brook
And rehearsing his tale, my fundament, my heart and soul were shook
And I felt a jarring needle, a kick, a stab, the punch of pain.

Baa baa baa baa baa
Baa baa baa baa baa
Baa baa baa baa baa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Luigi Mangione

The Luigi Mangione thinkpieces have begun and most of them sound so lamentable and out of touch to anybody who has followed his story without immediately pursing their lips, uttering ten Hail Marys and shielding their children’s eyes, as to be practically laughable. For the Evening Standard, Mangione stands for a divided America; a thinkpiece in the Independent considers the online comments “less helpful than salacious”; France’s traditionally leftwing paper Libé published an op-ed calling for an end to the hero worship of Mangione.  On Instagram, the comments under this article immediately went hog-wild: “How legitimate is it for bourgeois newspapers to take part in this debate when they spend their time legitimising social violence?”; “Lol, Luigi rid us of a deadweight. While income gaps keep widening, you should expect us to revolt against those who benefit from the system”; “Good evening - no.” You can’t understand the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione if you aren’t online; indeed, ...
Read more

Thoughts on It's A Sin

Perhaps the biggest gotcha in cinema - or the most famous - comes in Pretty Woman, after Vivian (Julia Roberts) has been refused service in a high-end shop. Returning to the shop the next day, she decides on a whim to confront the snooty saleswomen who had spurned her, showing them the money that they missed out on. “Big mistake. Huge!,” she crows before waltzing off again, leaving the two women gobsmacked. Pow pow! It’s a little like a scene in a western, where the cowboy disarms an enemy and then saunters off into the sunset.  Russell T. Davies’ new TV show, about five friends in London at the height of the AIDS crisis, features what feels like dozens of these scenes - big heartswelling moments of characters smartly putting people in their place, before walking off, leaving their antagonist open-mouthed and speechless. One such moment comes when the gang employ a lawyer, Lizbeth Farooqi (Seyan Sarvan), to get their friend Colin out of medical imprisonment. At this point, the prog...
Read more

On getting older

Last week I was lying around on my bed with my kids, nattering about this and that, occasionally boffing one another with a pillow, and grabbing them for a kiss or a stroke of their hair. These are the times in which you see each other intently; when it isn't rude to stare at someone and drink them in. (I suppose those moments also happen post-coitum, when the intimacy of somebody else's presence makes you see them in another light, and you can revel in the curl of their eyelashes, the purr of their breathing and heat of their limbs.) The children seem to appreciate these sort of listless playfights we have, and of course I also cherish these times: the miraculous softness of their skin; their hair, bed-curled and gleaming; and the rot they come out with, a rag-bag of references, overheard opinions, absurd hypotheses and nonsensical babble. The intensity of their gaze can be ferocious, and they often poke at me, feel my moustache, jiggle my earring, and observe something unbidd...
Read more