I didn't have the heart to call this the "Friday Jukebox" although, really, that's what it is.
But for this particular Friday the music isn't here because I like the music but for what the music means to me.
When we were waiting for baby Bryn we did all the things that prospective parents do; prepared her nursery, sifted through names, thought of and dreamt of what our lives would be like together with her.
During that time I fastened on this:
It's actually a horrible song, really, probably originally Irish but best known from the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, called "The Willow Garden" or "Rose Connolly". In it the singer has murdered his lover in a spectacularly gruesome fashion and is now going to hang for his crime.
I have no idea why I thought that this would make a terrific lullaby, but I did.
I only got to sing it to her once, and by then she was past the hearing of it.
It is an old song and not a popular one. You don't often hear it. But whenever I do I think of her, and what might have been, and the small portion of my heart that died with her twists and burns and reminds me that dying only touches the dead once, but the living that remain behind die again a little every day they remember the lost.
1 comment:
I, too, loved that song and found myself humming it as a lullaby. But the song I sang the most as lullaby was by a Greek songstress,
I Gave My Love a Cherry. And now, and when my youngest was a missing runaway, that song played in my head involuntarily. This spring sometime, that youngest will be back in Afghanistan, and I know what will be playing in my dreams and waking....as if to be an incantation against griefs that could come.
Post a Comment