Poetry

Always something there to remind me…

Do you ever wake up with a song playing in your head?

With lyrics by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, this one, I discovered, was originally recorded as a demo for Dionne Warwick in 1963, and first charted for Lou Johnson in the summer of 1964.

And then, in the early eighties, just as I was entering my thirties, and tasting delicious, exacting motherhood for the first time, the song was revived by Naked Eyes, a British band whose video is on Youtube:

Always something there…

Always Something There to Remind Me

The Lyrics

I walk along the city streets you used to walk along with me
And every step I take reminds me of just how we used to be
Well, how can I forget you, girl?
When there is always something there to remind me
Always something there to remind me

As shadows fall, I pass a small cafe where we would dance at night
And I can’t help recalling how it felt to kiss and hold you tight
Well, how can I forget you, girl?
When there is always something there to remind me
Always something there to remind me
I was born to love her, and I will never be free
You’ll always be a part of me
Oh whoa ooh whoa ooh whoa oh

If you should find you miss the sweet and tender love we used to share
Just go back to the places where we used to go and I’ll be there
Well, how can I forget you, girl?
When there is always something there to remind me
Always something there to remind me
I was born to love her, and I will never be free
You’ll always be a part of me
‘Cause there is always something there to remind me

Always something there to remind me

Wo, wo, wo, oh, oh, oh!

Other singers of the song include Sandy Shaw 1964; R.B. Greaves 1969; the Hippos 1999; All Saints 1998; and the crooner, Richard Poon in the 2000s. In fact, this song has been recorded widely over time and space. Eddy Mitchell, (acca Claude Moine) a French singer of Rock, R&B, and country music sang the song in French (Toujours un coin qui me rappelle) to great acclaim in 1965.

In the second half of the 1960s, I was living in France. There I was enchanted by the powerful and moving songs of George Brassens, Edie Piaff and Jacques Brel.

Ne me quitte pas…

What about you, does this ever happen to you? See my post on Cargoes on this site at http://anneskyvington.com.au/a-funny-thing-happened/

It’s about stuff surging up from the depths of the Unconscious without your doing?

September 19, 2019 2 comments

Poetry Writing

Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now

First a note about the painting, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, that serves here as a symbol for Joni Mitchell’s song. Both speak of life, love and beauty.

For Plato – and so for the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy – Venus had two aspects: she was an earthly goddess who aroused humans to physical love, or she was a heavenly goddess who inspired intellectual love in them.

Plato further argued that contemplation of physical beauty allowed the mind to better understand spiritual beauty. So, those looking at Venus, the most beautiful of goddesses, might at first note a physical response, followed by a lifting of their minds towards the godly.

A Neoplatonic reading of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus suggests that 15th-century viewers would have looked at the painting and felt their minds lifted to the realm of divine love.” (Wikipedia)

Mitchell’s song reveals a more modern approach and understanding of reality. In Both Sides Now, she questions whether her experiences of love and life have been the real thing, or as illusionary as clouds floating in the sky. Could this be another way of exploring, from a different angle, the same questions that Plato referred to in his philosophical writings? That is, how poetic words and songs may hint at and reflect the ‘beauty’ of truths, often concealed beneath the surface of things.

April 26, 2018 1 comment

Poetry Writing

a funny thing happened …

Cargoes by John Mansfield

I woke up the other morning with an old verse I’d learnt at school — not sure which year, but it was at least half a century ago — playing in my head like on a tape recorder. And the rhythm was still there!

I’m sure some of my readers will have also known this poem from school days: “Cargoes” by John Masefield?

Even the foreign words were still intact and popping up out of the subconscious like bubbles from a geyser.

It took me some days before I got around to Googling the poem and finding oral renditions of it on YouTube. I think what I liked about the poem (and still do) was the exotic-sounding words, not to mention the rhythm of the seas, and the sense of the wind in the sails. It lifted me out of the dreary classroom and into exotic faraway places .

The contrast of the last stanza, with the two preceding ones, always enchanted me in class. That’s when the rhythm changes to mimic the type of sturdy, industrial-age “coaster” vessel and its more prosaic cargo.

I read somewhere that the cargo items in Stanza 2 were taken directly from the Bible.

March 1, 2018 4 comments

Mythos Nature Poetry

The earth is sick and in need of salvage

Sick Earth

The earth is sick, its lungs stuffed and
out of puff, its bones brittle near to break
cancer cells spreading throughout its crests
amid tumescent landfill dense as gas
Her womb’s barren as melting ice
all of this oblivious only to the unexamined life

August 21, 2017 2 comments

Mythos Poetry

Our Galactic Address: A Poem

Galactic Address

What are we doing here on this moving globe
Earth insects swimming in the Orion Way
far from the centre of the Galaxy
clinging to the cavity
of the Local Bubble
in this solar system called the Milky Way?

An insignificant metal ball,
trapped in motion,
endlessly, drawing
circles concentrically
around the fiery sphere,
mirrored in this movement
by sibling planets all
disciples of the father star?

As I look up into the night sky
from here, my galactic address,
the other planets are invisible
to the naked eye within the softly
gleaming ribbon arching there.
Better here, methinks, from where
I stand at the inner edge of this spiral
shaped confluence of gas and dust,
than in the Galactic Centre—
thought to be a large Black Hole!

Photo Credit: NASA found on Wikihow

August 16, 2017 2 comments