Flowers for Paolo (Fiori per Paolo): ‘These are the Last Days’ / Narcissus Dancing

from Benedictions (2015-2018) by Sean Brennan

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lyrics

IV.) 'These are the Last Days'

Survival: that too. It’s the old landscape, rediscovered
up here, where, for us, it’s more eternal.
These are the last days, or - which amounts to the same - the last years,
of plowed fields with tree trunks in rows over ditches,
of white mud around mulberry trees just pruned,
of embankments still green over dry canals.
Even here, where a pagan was once Christian, and with him
his land, his cultivated field…
A new age, with it dark years of barbarism,
its Romanesque Aprils, shall reduce all this
to nothingness, and so we may weep for it.
How can those who will not know this surviving earth
ever understand us? Or say who we once were?
Yet it is we who must understand them,
that they might be born, however lost to these bright days,
these magnificent winter stillnesses,
in the sweet, tempestuous South, the shadow-covered North…

Epilogue: Narcissus Dancing?

…
I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.

translation by Steven Sartarelli

credits

from Benedictions (2015-2018), track released January 11, 2020
‘Flowers for Paolo (Fiori per Paolo)’

Lyrics by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Performed by Carolyn Flaherty & Ben Higginbotham

Engineered by Aoun Abdelhamid, mixed and mastered by Saguiv Rosenstock & Ruben Radlauer

Recorded in an undisclosed set of locations in Boston, MA & Manhattan, NY

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Sean Brennan Brooklyn, New York

composer/arranger

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