The Poetry Show: Opheus and Eurydice

Enlighten Radio Presents

 

Lost Love and the Birth of Poetry

 

 

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a tragic tale about a musician, Orpheus, who journeys to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice. Eurydice dies shortly after their wedding from snakebite. Orpheus, heartbroken, uses his music to persuade Hades, the god of the underworld, to allow her return. It does not work out. Broadcast LIVE Wednesdays, 10 AM on https://player.enlightenradio.org Hosts: Janet Harrison, John Case This Episode Recorded April 30, 2025

The Makers

by Howard Nemorov

 

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.
They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.
They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationhsip, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

 

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