Sunday, September 24, 2017

Django Reinhardt French jazz guitarist and composer

And now for something different! Click on the links. French with English subtitles and if you let the videos play, in English.




Django Reinhardt
 


 23January 1910 – 16 May 1953) was a Belgian-born, Romani French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant by far.



Saturday, September 23, 2017

October poem of the month



Acroterion
(In Europe)


They lean into your world
from a facade with a different sense
having been chiseled in an age
of fine distinct lines with serious mouths
and brooding eyes

and are the keepers of cobblestone,
narrowed and angled streets
like rivers and tributaries spreading
through and around cities.
And above us

on buildings adorned
and pastoral, admired and forgotten,
these heads of Europe, these angels
and bloody battle scenes;
their lives passing

like turned pages of history;
generations of stone discolored
and worn now rubbing shoulders
with the baker and pizza maker
and student who gives them no thought.

He-gave you world philosophy,
she-lost her head, they-redefined faith,
he- created symphonies
and poems alive forever;
sins remembered and discovered,

lands conquered and full of bone and blood,
science scorned and ships sailing the seas
and so it is easy to feel the solid steel
of a sword and march down the old streets
and feel the weight of time.


Steven Pelcman

Poetry Salzburg Review Austria