npm pmmu #12: true friendship

This month I'm posting daily Poetry-Music Match-Ups, and you're invited to join me! (See the bottom* of the post for ideas.)  When I don't have a crowd-sourced combo scheduled, I'll share one of my own many PMMUs!  If something comes to your mind, send it to me HERE.

Brenda Harsham of Friendly Fairy Tales provides today's Match-Up, which follows on from Sunday's consideration of friendship suggested by my dad.

Brenda wrote a haibun about friendship. A haibun is a Japanese form of prose followed by poetry--in this case one of many quotes about earthly friendship that caught her eye.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. — Unknown

Brenda "pulled the haiku out of it, reworked them, tinkered a bit and voila"--and she sent a photo to go with it too!

True Friendship in Four Haiku || Brenda Harsham

 

alone in a crowd

everyone else seems happy

what is wrong with me

hike, chat, share

listen with support and love

friendship unfurls

I look for your face

the angle of your eyebrows

I smile inside and out

when I’m weary

you lay your cheek along mine

your warmth is my sun

She pairs these words with another classic that reaches out of my father's generation and into ours:

 Simon and Garfunkel "Bridge over Troubled Water" 1970

Listening to this again, I was surprised--I think of it as a quiet acoustic performance, but it swells and soars towards the end, giving me a very different feel than Brenda's more restrained haiku.  I especially like the third one. (Interestingly, Paul Simon's composition drew deliberately from gospel music and that same "friend indeed.")

Thanks to Brenda, and stay tuned for more on friendship and kindness later this week.

*Ways to match-up poetry and music--take your pick:

·      your own poem with music that you've realized goes with it,

·      your own music with a poem that goes with it,

·      someone else's poem with someone else's music to match, 

·      song lyrics that you find particularly poetic,

·      poems written AS song lyrics

·      poems inspired by songs,

·      songs written about poems, 

·      poems written about songs, 

·      favorite nursery rhymes (which often have tunes),

·      and any other poetry-music combinations that make sense to you.