Stray in the Void
The background music written for this piece by Koray Birenheide
Where endless waters many-foldAnd waves are sluggish trav’ling far
Where time is young and men are old
And trapped beyond a million stars
The dying see it clearly, though
The living they might wander
Deep inside and deep below
As wise men strife to ponder.
Can you hear the bells that chime so bright
In darkness waving endless spume
They call you to the afterlife
Go now or be consumed…
Inside the waters calm and still
Your ship will drift with furled in sails
And perseverance you’ll need and skill
When you drift inside the void; searching for the gate
A dark, empty space and inside there is only the gate
The one that leaves the void
The one that leads to our plane,
The one we keep inside.
Two worlds connected by this ocean,
The one that all know to be real,
The one that shifts in constant motion
And in-between the void, this sea
We drift towards an endless horizon
One that we can and cannot see
Our mind is water, our will is iron
We drift towards the fate we meet
Hush now my friend,
we both will go
Where the bells chime high,
where the drums beat low
we all are stray, stray in the void
And the sky is drawn in endless phantasms
In half-remembered dreams
That twitch like mortal schisms, spasms
So beautiful and mad to be seen
Where the clockwork’s ticking from afar
And endless gears and age old metal
Creek loud and somehow muffled, raw
We seek it, following a fallen petal
There is no wind, there never was
All that is mighty in either worlds
The void has brought to naught
As life itself unwinds, unfurls
Will I wander here forever
On this ship that is my mind
I am an eternal traveler
The drums, they beat, the bells, they chime
The waves that sometimes spill the deck
Are made of nothingness alone
They wash the planks to emptiness
And make my ship creek, moan
I turn the wheel times left, times right
It matters not I know
As I drive deeper into the void
The oar is broken as the bow
And so I go on eternally
The gate seems never far and yet
As the silence beckons me
How am I filled with so much dread?
Yes, we are stray
we all are stray, stray in the void
I know absolutely nothing about poetry (especially English poetry) so I can't say much besides express how much I loved it. It's really, really beautiful, full of eerie images that I could see in my mind. The rythm too was spot on, especially with the background music. And that music! I loved|/i] it. The slow rythm, the way the high notes were constrated with the low ones, the apparition of the violin to give a "smoother" feeling. The repetitive theme helped a lot to allude to the waves (honestly, I pictured the high notes as the chime of the bell, the low notes as the sluggish waves and the violin part as the slow, languid travelling ship). The fading sound of the piano & the slowing rythm goes well with the ending of the poem - I could feel the dread at the idea of the silence, the fear of the narrator. If I had to summarize the emotions I felt while reading and listening, I'd say "lost", which, given that the concluding line calls us all stray, is I think what you wanted us to feel. All in all, this is a great article. Good job!
Thank you! I can see that the poetry really connected with you, and that is really the greatest thing I can hope for as a poet ^-^ The feelings and images I portray here come straight from the heart and soul, and like you, I was really there, when I came up with them, so it's great, to me, that I could bridge that gap with my words and get you across. The same goes for the music, which I wrote before the poem, writing the poem while listening to it. Together they paint a picture of the endless space inside our minds that can be pressing, depressing, but also liberating and inspiring.