Thank you, readers, subscribers, and thank you, inspiring Substackers! Of course, there is much to be grateful for in this life, perhaps foremost, the fact of being alive, of having been born. Maybe Bruegel’s painting and my poem from May have something to say about that?
alan girling
February 3rd, 1959*
snow, night and pilot error
(or was it the toss of a coin?)
pitched them
into an Iowa cornfield
as I was being born
no one then remarked
the co-incidence of events
or informed me ever
of their augury
except perhaps Bruegel
whose Icarus fell to the sea
while oblivious earth
was being plowed underneath
of course neither myth nor pride
had risen that day to precipitate
the music’s dying . . .
it was merely another sad end
in a world of beginnings
*Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) died in a plane crash on this day
Thank you!
I remember the moment I heard, being small it was the loss of the Big Bopper above all that affected me, walking to grade school with the older kids. Unanimous in shock.
Poor Icarus. A story told to me as an example of what could happen to you if you didn’t listen to your father...
So many fall from the sky. Too many.
"I can't remember if I cried/when I read about his widowed bride/but something touched me deep inside/the day the music died..."