The puppy’s snapping jaws;
The whack of oaken bat;
The thwack of tennis ace;
Each one is singing grace!
The crack of Maestro Thor;
The roar of Neptune’s tide;
The sound of buzzy bee;
The distant bird’s: “Tee-Twee!!”
The pattering of rain;
That oddly warms the heart;
The purr of fluffy cat
Who always means ‘that’s that’
The laughing of a babe;
And then the first real word.
The far and lonely train
Who whistles out each pain.
The crack of trodden branch —
Raised hairs upon the neck;
The distant tolling bell —
Who dongs that all is well.
The world sings sweet songs.
Though music rights not wrongs,
The love that sings through all:
Can you harken to its call?
Commentary.
I’m mainly a visual person. I’m much more distracted by, for instance, a butterfly wafting by than a truck backfiring. Like nearly everyone, I love music. But I don’t go out of my way to hear it nearly so much as do many others. But there are sounds that I love: Simple sounds. That is why the poem itself needs to be short and neat. Those are the kinds of sounds I’m talking about. Discrete.
And some of these sounds I think I inherited a love for. Others, I grew to love. And some sounds I believe have elements of innate beauty and of learned significance. The sound of a well-hit baseball is satisfying in some deep sense over and above the significance in terms of the game. It has a resonance of beauty beyond the even more important sense that it shows what humans are capable of. All of us feel pride when we watch an athlete perform some amazing feat of strength and skill and training and will and concentration all coming down to a moment of truth and *CRACK!* there it is and you know long before it clears the fence because you heard the Home Run first.
So, there’s that. But I can’t help wondering why we can’t find a way to also feel pride in all the accomplishments of all human beings. They’re all in our family. And, we recognize that, at some level. See paragraph above.
The snapping sound of a puppy’s jaws “missing” a toy is something I haven’t heard for many decades. Sadie reminded me of that sound from more than a half century ago. Some sounds you remember your entire life.
petersironwood 