”…but what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair,…”
- The Heiligenstadt Testament: Ludwig Van Beethoven
Pounding on the ivory and ebony
Intimately familiar, is each piano key
Unfailingly, it brings sound alive-
The music of the Danube,
The hillocks, hamlets and vales
And Titans’ fiery wheel
Encircling a muted me.
How nature fused into musical notes
Is one of the greatest mysteries
And then my deafened ears
Quicken to life teeming
Around me
I began to fathom
The many faces of melancholy.
My pianoforte understands that
Music cocoons me,
A language, conjoined inseparably
With my psyche
reminding me, once again, of my sanity.
Ah, at last I sip at
The springs of tranquility.
I pound no more at doors
Of a listless fate.
No more does the cityscape
Lure me, and now I bid
Vienna, adieu.
Humiliation and apathy!
What else have you to offer me?
In Hieligenstadt, the muse is kinder,
My sketchbook messier
Scribbled, amended and refined
Always in a tearing hurry
As inspiration comes to me.
Music makes me conversant with memory
Woods, silence, storm and nature’s bounty.
My symphonic steam, magically
Surges out into – cosmic rhythms
And, lo I proffer
nine-coined symphonies;
a refined ‘Für Elise’,
The Pastoral Symphony,
Testaments of inherent harmony.
****************************
- Mumtaz N K
17-09-2020
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