November verse 10: Wiggle and Jiggle at the Library
For Scott Morrison
We're here to sing and dance and jiggle,
mums, a dad and sundry grands,
toddlers primed with twinkle-twinkle,
row-row, incy-wincy hands.
'Welcome all, here's bells and shakers.
Let's go where the songs will take us.
We'll have great fun this afternoon
though sadly I can't hold a tune.'
That was no lie. She sang with gusto,
high and low but always wrong,
We tried and failed to sing along
fell silent on that all-day bus. To
sing together lifts the heart
but badly led, song falls apart.
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Aah! That thing about singing and not being truly able – rings bells for me. I remember this very season almost upon us back in my Japan teaching days – with middle schoolers and seniors and university students – singing (maybe holding the tune if not tunefully so – Xmas songs and Christmas carols (all let loose in shopping centres across Japan in any event) after explaining their general intent – snowy season: Frosty The Snowman, Rudolf, I’m dreaming… – and the decidedly unbiblical Santa story (but not in Australia – for which we’d sing the Aussie Christmas Carol “The north wind is tossing the leaves….the red dust is over the town…etc.) – or the Jesus nativity tales! (Adeste fidelis… We Three Kings, Away in a manger… and And even within that reference of mine – the red dust bit – acknowledged;edgement that for umpteen decades the invader kinds of land-use has been the antithesis to the careful millennia-long land management practices of the First Nations peoples! And just before departing Tbilisi in Georgia on Monday last – our Georgian guide telling us of forest wild-fires in the country’s mountainous north-west – country mostly above 2000 metres above sea level – peaks over 5,000 metres – and despite recent falls of snow among which we had tramped and slid and fallen – no bones broken thank goodness – and where such fires had never before occurred – amid retreating glaciers – climate change had well-and-truly arrived!
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Thank for that truly Proustian comment, Jim – from a children’s event in suburban Sydney to the mountains of Georgia by way of Latin sacred song, Japanese supermarkets and the havoc wrought by colonialism in Australia, all miraculously cohering in virtually a single sentence.
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You’ve enumerated perfectly all my faults of passion and connection and long-windedness! Merci beaucoup, mon ami!
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But being Proustian is not a fault. Quite the opposite
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