Christmas in Arcadia

let the song be sung for its own sake

Words and music by Jonathan Potter, all rights reserved — Merry Christmas!

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

Angel voices vibrate in the air
Peter Quince sits at the clavier
Pagan kings and sad-eyed queens
Stir from their day’s despair
Sing, sing a song of what it means
To follow Pan across the Golden Greens
And hear a voice that words can never share

Shepherds hear and leave their flocks behind
To follow voices wise men have divined
Slow-minded men begin to feel
Themselves to dance inclined
Ring, ring the bells and let them peal
Across the sadness of the commonweal
And let us all with happiness be blind

Let folderol be fiddle-dee-dee and so
It follows that the trumpet blast must blow
Composed in time the notes will flow
And go where they will go
Flow, flow now fast and later slow
Look out, the saxophone below
Casts out its diamonds in the snow

Mournful waves may break upon the shore
And shake the strings to play a mournful score
Funeral pyres and demon choirs
May crackle at the door
Flail, flail the violins and wires
Until the terrible mournfulness expires
And casts its bitter flowers on the floor

Cleansed and comforted, let sleepers wake
To clarifying clarinets which take
A sleepy stream of consciousness
And give it a little shake
Rise, rise and sing a song to bless
The present moment in its ceaselessness
And let the song be sung for its own sake

Rhythm of the blood and of the skin
Molecules pulsing from within
Poise upon the moment’s dance
Ready to begin
Beat, beat the drums of circumstance
Take up the tambourine of chance
Surrender to the spasm and the spin

Grave-lipped lisping goat-hooved majorettes
Dance in the ballroom of their lost regrets
To the tune a tailor whistles
Measuring out his debts
Dance, dance around the blooming thistles
Scattered on the floor with love’s epistles
Dance until the tailor man forgets

Tap-toed, nude, and partridge-feathered femmes
Fresh from orchestrating requiems
Go caroling toward a distant room
Whence the music stems
Join, join the hands of bride and groom
Let the wedding cancel out the gloom
Of thought weighed down with leaden diadems

Overshoes and undergarments strewn
Around the chamber where musicians tune
Their instruments with merriment
Throughout the month of June
Pluck, pluck the strings and then repent
Of boredom underneath the circus tent
Of gravity beheld by a balloon

Angel voices vanish from the air
Electric lights affix their golden glare
The song is finished, I am through
With what my song would dare
Stay, stay a moment in your pew
Sing a hymn like pious people do
And hear again what angel choirs declare

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