Air of Boxing Day, a Lost Ballad

Air of Boxing Day, a Lost Ballad

(Growing up in the Caribbean/Creole/Choctaw/Spanish/French culture of the lower Mississippi River, we did not learn of Boxing Day, a British thing, until a few years back when an English neighbor here in France invited us for the post-Xmas drinks, meal, country walk, drinks, pudding, parlor games, drinks. Somebody played the piano and asked if we knew that Eric Satie was homosexual, as if it made a difference knowing that and thinking about it while interpreting one of the “Gymnnopédies,” to which we had no reply but a smile and a wish for the day to end.)

Hints of progress & success
Not a bad way to address
Airs of Boxing Day

Hello to you, progress
Long may you live, success
Every day should remind us

The universe cares nothing for us
Icy comets don’t get all the fuss
We make of our lives

So be happy as a three-legged dog
So what if life’s a morning fog
It’s all you’ve got

So bother not the Great Leader’s bile
Don’t think of any blatherings infantile
No, go simmer your own soup

Soup conjured from yesterdays
Where we imagined our today
Without ingrown dismay

Wondering if it’s a dream flighty
Bringing down the rich & mighty
To live our days passing away

The sun rising & the clouds passing
The garbage guys whistling & banging
Oh, smell the way they sing

The simple grit & greasy moil
On the fingertips tasting the oil
We bathe in every day

Now it’s sterile electronic chatterings
Noisome & gutkilling as chitterlings
For weary brains seeking

How we typed bloody ink onto paper
Fingertip arpeggios clacking cypher
Songs from the vibrant machine

Hints of progress & success
Fighting the urges to regress
We leap ahead

Avanti!
Réussir!
Onward!

What a Boxing this day

A ditty by R Young, to be set to music one day by S. Santos-Dumont)
Photograph by D Young. St. Paul de Fenouillet, Winter Solstice 2017.

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