“Good Riddance”
Eurydice’s Song from Hades, performed by Ashley Barrett (written by Darren Korb)

Farewell
To all the earthly remains

No burdens
No further debts to be paid

Atlas
Can rest his weary bones
The weight of the world
All falls away
In time

Goodbye
To all the plans that we made

No contracts
I’m free to do as I may

No hunger
No sleep except to dream
Mild and warm
Safe from all harm
Calm

Good riddance
To all the thieves
To all the fools that stifled me
They’ve come and gone
And passed me by
Good riddance
To all

Farewell
To all the еarthly remains

No burdens
No further dеbts to be paid

Atlas
Can rest his weary bones
The weight of the world
All falls away
In time

---

“Lament of Orpheus”
Orpheus’ song from Hades, written and performed by Darren Korb

Hear, o gods, my desperate plea
To see my love beside me

Sunk below the mortal sea
Her anchor weighs upon me
Fasten her tether unto me
That she may rise to sail free

Don’t look back

Close enough that light we can see
My doubt betrays the better of me
A glance to the stern is all it would be
That anguished shade shall haunt me

Ever on

Calm
Seas
Winds a-lee
But now the squall’s upon us
We’re foundering
Drowning

Don’t look back

(Darren Korb, 2018)

MARKING TIME
(for freda robertson)

jogging out in the morning
against the few high clouds the blue
sky is a memory like a sheer silk fabric
held so far back i can’t see thru it–
when i breathe the new air my body
is young all over, a smell reminds
how the two pear trees are white
again, their flowers ephemeral
as the words i recite to pass time
in repetitious wheezed breath–
squirrels, blue jays, downed trees for markers
to say how far i’ve gone, to be used
in their brief names to crowd my mind
with anything i can count on.
today as i struggle against the wind
up the hill i watch a small butterfly
wavering with spread wings, and remember
dreaming of my sister who called
last night when i was sleeping, and how
twenty years ago she gave me
from the held darkness of her brown palms
a black butterfly with yellow specks.
what it was she said is immaterial,
there is the gesture though:
and watching a bird overhead fly
past the disk of sun, there is a flaring
shadow fanned down from above
that flickers like a rustled page
with a poem on it; it is that quick
flute darkness of a sister’s voice
a brother will hear in his heart
when he’s breathing deeply enough.

Flowers
by Anaïs Mitchell, from Hadestown

[EURYDICE]
What I wanted was to fall asleep
Close my eyes and disappear
Like a petal on a stream, a feather on the air

Lily white and poppy red
I trembled when he laid me out
“You won’t feel a thing,” he said, “when you go down”
Nothing gonna wake you now

Dreams are sweet, until they’re not
Men are kind, until they aren’t
Flowers bloom, until they rot, and fall apart

Is anybody listening?
I open my mouth and nothing comes out
Nothing, nothing gonna wake me now

Flowers, I remember fields of flowers
Soft beneath my heels
Walking in the sun, I remember someone
Someone by my side, turned his face to mine
And then I turned away, into the shade

You, the one I left behind
If you ever walk this way
Come and find me lying in the bed I made

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem
written about something
important
or special
that’s gonna happen
or already did.
Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.

Like what?! Lamont asks.
He’s all slouched down in his seat.
I don’t feel like writing about no occasion.

How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says.
What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain’t
June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact,
he says, it’s January and it’s snowing.
Then his voice gets real low and he says
And when it’s January and all cold like this
feels like June’s a long, long ways away.

The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus.
Some of the kids are nodding.
Outside the sky looks like it’s made out of metal
and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes
and coming underneath them too.

I seen Lamont’s coat.
It’s gray and the sleeves are too short.
It’s down but it looks like a lot of the feathers fell out
a long time ago.
Ms. Marcus got a nice coat.
It’s down too but real puffy so
maybe when she’s inside it
she can’t even tell January from June.

Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that’s
an occasion.
But she looks a little bit sad when she says it
Like she’s sorry she ever brought the whole
occasional poem thing up.

I was gonna write about Mama’s funeral
but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth
zapped all the ideas from my head.

I guess them arguing
on a Tuesday in January’s an occasion
So I guess this is an occasional poem.

I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy’s garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep