“Dance, Ballerina, dance, and do your pirouette
In rhythm with your aching heart,
Dance, Ballerina, dance, you mustn’t once forget
A dancer has to dance the part,
Once you said his love must wait its turn,
You wanted fame instead, I guess that’s your concern,
We live and learn . . . and love is gone, Ballerina, gone . . .”
In rhythm with your aching heart,
Dance, Ballerina, dance, you mustn’t once forget
A dancer has to dance the part,
Once you said his love must wait its turn,
You wanted fame instead, I guess that’s your concern,
We live and learn . . . and love is gone, Ballerina, gone . . .”
In her parted lips, I glimpsed something that—in my own unpracticed, sloppy awe—struck me as holy. For a moment, I saw a window and not my wife. When I walked to her, it was like peering straight into something primordial and desperate, where the inscrutable space between stars had once birthed myths and gods, built palaces of story and scripture in which human doubts found a place to rest their weary brows.
“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,” I said.
“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,” I said.
He meets Judas, one night during his voyaging. It’s a subject you see a lot on stained-glass windows, actually, paintings, things like that. He travels for months on end, encountering demons, sea monsters, every kind of creature you can imagine, and then one night he comes upon a man chained to a pillar of rock, in the middle of the sea – just there, just there in the ocean like this great, tall fang rising from the waves, this thing that shouldn’t be there, a man at the mercy of the elements. So St Brendan calls out to him and he learns that the man is Judas – Judas who gave Jesus up for dead, Judas the failed apostle – and St Brendan learns that Judas is there because the way in which the Lord chooses to show him mercy is to free him from his torments, to free him from hell on Sundays and Holy Days, and cast him adrift on the ocean, where he can at least feel the wind on his face. I always like that part of the story. St Brendan stays all night, until Judas’ respite from his torments is over, and then he has to go on.
“One cannot count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
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