Listening to Beethoven’s Egmont overture”from Goethe’s opera,
depicting his hero’s ideals during high tides, Napoleon the liberator
metamorphosing as “the little
Emperor”.
II
The composer taking Goethe’s raison d’etre and transformed its heroic trump into tragedy, crossing out Napoleon’s name from his Third Symphony’s dedication, the Erica..
Come the Revolution in Vienna, Austria.
III
Here im the City that never sleeps, the tyranny wasn’t Napoleon revealing his true self, but a cannibalistic Nature, crashing down upon the denizens, many of whom inhabited a turf named Brighton Beach, two blocks from the wildly roaring wind capped Atlantic Ocean waves.
III
“Evacuate Evacuate” came
word from Gracie Mansion’s low land command center.
One citizen stone deaf to the
pleas, awoke to four feet of surging salt water and a frenzied fish, out of its orbit...
“Never again,” cried the
survivor, her middle aging life engulfed and surfeited by not listening. Almost
like her hanging umbilical cord tied to her ear drums.
“I never did listen. That’s how
I was brought up. Thinking I could outwit my beginnings My origins. My East
Flatbush roots.”
IV
“Not young enough to cry.
Old enough to know tragedy.
I am wasted.,” she
lamented, her hands gripping the fish. Slipping it into a bowl, once the
savior for the gold fish of her youth,
the bowl lettered “Sandy”
*****
You have to lose yourself to
find yourself.
Brighton (Russian) Beach, two blocks fro the
quieted Atlantic Ocean. November 1, 2012.
