An Emperor
and an Actress
upon a golden Path
where the Woods were thick
with Rocks and Roots
and muddy underfoot
and an endless Rain was falling
its endlessness was falling
and not one silver Cloud to see
from the Hollow
of an olden Tree
Emperor Franz Joseph I and companion
______
gw2012/
LIBRARY BOOKS:
The Fifth Column - Ernest Hemingway
The Proust Screenplay - Harold Pinter
The Complete Stories - Alice Walker
A Henry Miller Reader - Henry Miller (Ed. John Calder)
Where do you get your ideas from - an active imagination/dreams/odd books???
ReplyDeletePat, The key to this one is based on the pun to do with a falling rain i.e. a falling reign. The Habsburg monarchy is coming to an end. The Emperor is having a liaison with an actress called Frau Schratt, in fact some sources claim with some authority that the couple were married in secret by a bishop sometime from 1909 onwards. The original Empress was murdered by the ubiquitous lone psychopath in about 1897 I think. The tree is the royal family tree - now hollow - now about to fall.
ReplyDeleteI should add that Austrian nouns being German always start with a capital letter - so I show that too. Tradition.
ReplyDeleteI just came upon your blog a week or so ago; am following it with interest. I want to share a poem I wrote last year. I wrote it after I saw a film on Chernobyl:
ReplyDeleteChernobyl
Toska –
Russian word which means
dull ache in the soul
Light of sun distilled, forced
through tunnels into funnels
glowing the teeth of the smile of the
child in Hiroshima.
Japanese Earthquake
rips up the nuclear power plants
and clouds of radiance
rain down and out into the air,
into the nose and mouth,
into the lungs, the genes.
In Chernobyl twenty five years later
the children of the children who breathed in the poison
have gene blasted brains,
gene ruined sclerotic muscles,
humps on the back
where their kidneys live
outside their bodies,
blood ruined arteries,
lymphless legs,
watching on television
the Japanese earthquake
and its incense of radiance.
Anne
Dear Anne, many thanks for sharing the poem. It is as you say "a dull ache of the soul". I was talking to someone yesterday who has friends in Japan who believe they are safe because they live 200kms from Fukushima...because that's the official IAEA-Japan Govt. misinformation line.
ReplyDelete