Meandering Post about Writing

This is the first time I’ve been without a creative project in a VERY long time and it’s weird. Baby Duck consumed most of 2019 and the culmination was fantastic. The Price was finished at the end of 2018. Besides those projects, I had a personal project that I also finished, a little book for a tiny audience of me and two other people. Yesterday I cleaned up my “studio.” It was filled with Baby Duck stuff for the book launch. Now it’s ready for something, but I have no idea what. Painting is a sketchy (ha ha) thing for me. I have to really FEEL it to do it. No stories to tell at the moment, either, so my life feels like it’s in a holding pattern.

A huge curve in my life’s normal pattern is the injured foot. It hasn’t even been that long — five weeks, and I know a bad sprain can take much longer to heal.

So, in the meantime, the dogs have gotten used to not going on a walk every day — or at all. And I continue to ride the Bike To Nowhere because I can do that and it’s about the best training there is for Langlauf which is the purpose of life anyway. I discovered videos on Youtube with absolutely fantastic rides lasting an hour or more — sometimes I ride the whole time, sometimes just 10 miles of wind sprints, basically a chain of fifty yard dashes from the seat of my Airdyne. They are produced by “Ride the World.” Here’s my favorite so far. To get to this spot, you “ride” a narrow road of amazing hairpin turns…

Last week there was lots of exciting chatter after my front page spread and interview. The guy who runs the papers in the San Luis Valley asked if I would be interested in doing a column — weekly or monthly — and I said sure. He also asked if I had any ideas for such a thing and, honestly, I don’t, but I shared a couple of ideas. He wrote back saying we’d meet at the end of this week, but it’s Thursday afternoon and there has been no word. Once more it looks like my promising journalism career is nipped in the bud. It was nipped in the bud back in 1974 when I got my BA and went immediately to the Boulder Daily Camera and asked for a job. “Can you type 35 wpm?” as the guy at the desk.

“No,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said.

But I don’t really have anything to say in a column. People around me know this place better than I do. I’m not going to write about politics. I could write about writing or putting a self-published book together, but I’m not sure I’m even interested in that — or that anyone else is, either.

And what can you tell people about writing? After teaching it for more than thirty years, what I know about it comes down to only a handful of things. First, to write you have to write. Second, you have to keep writing, even if you have no reason to write and nothing to say. Third, you will, sooner or later, maybe, find yourself becoming interested in the words you use and the way you use them; but you might not. Fourth, you might start reading what you’ve written. This can go one of two ways — you can fall absolutely and uncritically in LOVE with it and, as we know, love is blind. OR you can think it’s such shit that you quit. Of the two, love is more dangerous BUT it will keep you going. And then…

Somewhere in there you’ll discover your voice. And you might discover your story, too, and after that? You have to stay true. Stories live apart from the writer. I think starting with a character is the easiest because, just like other people, characters carry a world with them and that gives you a lot of information you won’t have to figure out by yourself. A strong character will tell you a LOT about him/herself and where he/she is from and what he/she values in life, yet, in many ways, it’s like meeting a new person.

Since I write historical fiction, I have to do research to learn about the worlds in which my characters live because THEY take it for granted that I know already. Since it’s THEIR world, they think everything around them is normal and part of everyone else’s life. You can tell them, “Dude here’s the thing. I live in the future. I’ve never hitched a horse to a wagon,” but that guy is NOT going to believe you so you have to learn how he does it.

In a way, the same is true if you write about the future. That future guy is all, “Dude, you know about this, they’re all over the place,” and won’t believe you when you say, “No, I didn’t know you could use a Fardel Gambit to escape a Bastorian Jail!”

That part of writing a story is fun. It’s fun going back in time and discovering that in the 13th century there WAS no paper or that in the 12th century there was an enormous earthquake in Northern Italy and thinking of the effect that would have on the world in which your characters live.

I actually have a WIP (sounds nasty. Means “work in progress”) but I’m not convinced. Necessarily it echoes some of Martin of Gfenn because it’s the story of a young guy learning to paint, but I don’t want it to be a repetition of that story and sometimes it feels like it is. I haven’t figured out who the protagonist is, either. I have only a vague idea of the world in which the teacher lived/lives. Lots of stuff still kind like a fog. Sometimes things just start that way and you have to let them do their thing until you’re doing it with them.

My goal, though all writers are often required by the people in their stories to abandon the goal, is to show the OTHER medieval world, the one in which young men joined the church not to serve God, but to get an education the only way that was possible. I want to write about the wandering scholars, their art, their values, their world.

I read this quotation from Picasso yesterday. It pretty much sums up my feelings about the WIP. “You mustn’t expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn’t interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.”

So maybe tomorrow morning I should just roll up my sleeves and see where Bro Benedetto and his illegitimate son, Michele, want me to go.

Dammit. I just got an idea for a newspaper column… I could interview a different artist in the San Luis Valley every month and write about that. Shit. See what happens when you “just write”? You get ideas.

Love Songs, Part II

Research is good. We usually look at the past through our own eyes and experience, and every once in a while a historian (we’ll call him “History Man”) will say, “Those people aren’t you, Sweet-cheeks. Those Medieval love songs that you are having such a hard time with AREN’T like love songs of today.”

“What?”

“No. Those guys had arranged marriages. They were stuck with whatever their parents had set up for them. These lyric poems are more along YOUR style of love.”

“You mean hopeless, unrequited, at an absurd distance, across insane age differences?”

“Yes, exactly. Is this or is this not you, ‘…poets of the Middle Ages would likely find our contemporary love rituals completely alien. Medieval desire…was expressed as an ideal to be constantly sought, but rarely attained.”

“Whoa. So you’re saying that not only is my sense of humor medieval but my view of love?”

“Yep. Feel better now? Ready to return to hopeless yearning and all that makes you so happily miserable?”

“Thank you History Man.”

You can read the rest of History Man’s thoughts here: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/february/valentine-medieval-desire-021113.html

Love Songs

This is the first time in decades I don’t have a story to work on. What I thought might be a good idea is looking more and more doubtful. I’ve been reading about and in the work of the Goliards and it’s — they — are notable for being priests who wrote love songs. 

Whoop-dee-do. And songs about drinking, the corruption of the church, the absurdity of doctrine, and poverty. But mostly love songs. Sometimes naughty love, but love. And if you’re a priest, is there any other kind of love? Maybe these are not my people. 

Sixty-two years ago when some crooner was crooning on the radio in the family kitchen, I asked my dad, “Why do they sing about love all the time?”

My dad gave me a startled look, like, “She’s only four, WTF?” then said, “Because love is the greatest thing in the world.”

“Why?”

“Helen, can I have a little more coffee?” 

Way to change the subject, Dad.

I’m not convinced that romantic love is the greatest thing in the world. There are lots of other really great things like the range, horses named Old Paint, exploration, adventure, art, and nature. It’s true there are a few anti-love songs, but love is still the main subject.  

One of the things I’ve always liked about Punk Rock is that while there are love songs, there are songs about other things. The more hard-core the Punk, the less likely there is to be a love song. It’s awesome. Often, when a Punk band sings about love, it’s not sappy love but something else. The Dead Kennedys’ best love song is “Too Drunk to Fuck.” Sorry, but there it is. Realistic, funny and ironic. 

I’ve been listening to The Pretenders a lot lately, and Chrissie Hynde has a few sappy love songs, but her love songs are mostly not. 

“I wanna do it, do it on the pavement.” That is not sappy.

Anyhoo…. Since I find all this love song stuff de-inspiring, I don’t know what’s up next. I’m not anti-love or bitter on the subject. I congratulate — and have deep respect for —  all of you who found your great love and are busy living happily ever after. That just isn’t my story. 

But why?

The model in front of me growing up wasn’t particularly happy, that’s one thing, probably, then I never wanted kids. I wanted adventure. For a while I thought a boyfriend or husband would also want adventure, and we’d go off into the world adventuring, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Even the most adventurous men I knew longed for wife and family, the ties that guys like in the movie K2 struggle against. Except one. He wanted adventure more than wife and family, and I think his romantic life has gone pretty much like mine. There is a kind of love between us, maybe a shared love of mountains, adventure and words, mutual esteem. Anyway, I treasure it, maybe partly because it’s love that doesn’t show up in love songs. 

In any case, I wonder what the protagonist will do so that I can write his story? I see him influenced by Goliard love songs, in a moment of heated passion impregnating a girl, then facing the betrayal of romance, thrown out of his monastery, sent wandering over the Alps to teach Martin to paint and then in his own Paul on the Road to Damascus moment realizing there is no better lover than art and returning to the monastery, seeing it as his best bet for a life as an artist. Maybe he’ll go that way. 

Ars longa, labilis est dilectio

“I’m a Writer, Not a Reader”

The phrase didn’t originate with me. It’s Umberto Eco in a book I haven’t read (and won’t). Reviewed in The Guardian.

“When people ask whether I’ve read this or that book, I’ve found that a safe answer is, ‘You know, I don’t read, I write.’ That shuts them up.” 

I am in a place where I have to read in order to write. I have to read a lot and some of it is good, interesting, wonderful. I like the subject matter. Reading all this will open a door to a shadow world I’ve long wondered about. 

Once I was a reader. I read voraciously (as do a lot of people with blogs here on WordPress). I think that changed because of two things. One, reading became research. A historical novel is a long research paper, hopefully more interesting, but without the research a story is just a bunch of modern people in costumes. That’s not what I want to write.

For example, I wrote the first draft of Martin of Gfenn without knowing that there was no paper in Northern Europe during his lifetime (13th century). Martin is a fresco painter, and I had him drawing cartoons on sheets of paper. That would have been like the wristwatch on the galley slave in Ben Hur or whatever. 

But research is a directed search for answers; it’s not sitting in a comfy chair enjoying a story unfolding. It’s a scavenger hunt through a labyrinth.

The other factor is reading hundreds, nay, thousands, nay, tens of thousands of student papers and having to grade them. That can sure take the bloom off the rose, so to speak. I ultimately devised rubrics for every single project so that I was not obliged to mark the same thing over and over and over again. Students like these rubrics because they made the whole thing of writing an essay less like lacing a boot inside a black bag in a dark room. 

Over the past decade there have been a few writers whose brilliance has been able to lure me from my “I hate reading” cave. The most notable is Jane Gardam. Her stories are good and her writing is brilliant, clean, clear humorous and fun to read, demonstrating knowledge of and sympathy for people. 

I have also enjoyed several Icelandic Sagas and have one on my table for the very cold winter days that will come. They, too, are fun to read, clean writing, lots of action, some challenging moral questions, great descriptions of scenery and believable characters. My favorite remains Njal’s Saga. It was a huge thrill to me to be in Iceland and see the very place where Njal’s problems started, the remains of the Althing at Thingvellir, all this with an understanding of how law had failed Njal. It was great, even though I was in a lot of pain. Njal’s story was the great pull that took me to Iceland. 

I think that’s what good stories do — transport you to a different world. OK, late spring in Iceland was a saga of its own, but I was able to reach a profound understanding of why there were so many sagas written. 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/rdp-wednesday-brilliance/

A Wandering Minstrel, I…

Everything’s on sale today, even WordPress blogs. Once I went (with the Evil-X who was a shopaholic) to an electronics store in San Diego — Frye’s — on Black Friday, and the line around the store was 2 hours to get in. He was even ready to stand in line. What could be in there that was worth two hours of my life? 

I hate shopping, but like most people I get that little “high” from buying something I want. I mostly shop online. I got into that habit when I was working so much that going to stores was almost impossible. I learned that there are a lot of ordinary things that are cheaper that way (toilet paper?). 

Now I’m starting to research the Goliards, and that’s involved shopping for books that no one wants to read. I bought some.

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Books like these are usually extremely expensive (my Amazon wishlist is full of books I want but will never be able to afford) or really cheap.

One of the interesting parts of research is that it usually starts with one book and that book has footnotes that lead to books that are more helpful. Right now I’m reading Helen Waddell’s  The Wandering Scholars. I like it (her) because she also rejects the term “Dark Ages,” and because of her clear passion for these wandering scholars (I also love them), but her writing presupposes knowledge I don’t have, AND she gushes. Her assumptions have made me reach and shown me what I need to learn, but the gushing… I don’t know. Still it’s not a history book; it’s an introduction to a time and place. Generally I like it — but what I like most are the occasional quotations from the poetry she’s writing about, poems mostly written in Medieval Latin, which, of course, I can’t read. Most of the medieval lyric poems I’ve read have been in medieval German which is bizarrely like Middle English. Actually, not all that bizarrely. Conveniently.

The Wandering Scholars relates some beautiful stories of these people, and one point has really hit home. Back in medieval times, if a person wanted a real education, he had to join a monastery. Lots of people joined monasteries for this reason (as well as others that had nothing to do with a monastic calling). Even with the grand teachers and the collections of books, monastery walls were confining. At a certain point, their minds heavily laden with the classics and the scripture, many of these scholars just needed out. They were called vagabonds, wanderers. Here’s a story:

Some are born wanderers; some have it thrust upon them; but the word vagus denotes often a mental quality…Ekkehard’s [ have no idea who that is, another rabbit hole for me] use of it is interesting.: he tells a story of a young monk of St. Gall, of a mind incorrigibly vagus, with whom discipline could do nothing and how, on a certain day, being forbidden to go beyond the monastery, he climbed in his restlessness the campanile — “O that I were where I (could) but see” — to look abroad, and missing his foot, crashed to the ground. (The Wandering Scholars)

This young monk dies, but not before he asks for his soul to be commended to the Virgins, because, he says, he is one. The attending doctor has masses said for the young scholar’s soul every year.

I was that restless person long ago. The rhythm of the wanderer’s life (as Helen Waddell writes) is that in youth, some need wide horizons and will sacrifice everything to have them. When they’re older many of the vagabond scholars settled down to monastic lives, sometimes of great severity. I’m not especially restless now. Most of the wide horizons I sought are now contained within me. 

Anyway, it’s fascinating, and I’m loving what I’m learning. Long ago, before I knew anything about the Middle Ages, I suspected this second world without knowing for sure it existed. When I wrote Martin of Gfenn I sensed, without knowing for sure, that there was an undercurrent of what we call “Humanism” beneath everything. It just seemed illogical that there wouldn’t have been. In the process of writing that book I found a wonderful book of German medieval lyric poetry that supported my idea very clearly and made me curious about who these people were. Then, finding the Codex Manesse, a beautiful book from the 13th/14th centuries that preserves — with illustrations! — the stories of the lives of these poets was pretty solid evidence.

I have a long journey ahead of me before I find my story. I think it is about Michele, Martin of Gfenn’s painting teacher, but I might be wrong. 

“Let no one in his travelling
Go against the wind,
Let him not, because he’s poor,
Look as though he sorrows.
Let him set before himself
Hope’s consolation, for
After sorrow comes,
Delight.”

Carmina Burana

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/rdp-friday-shop/

The Wandering Scholars

I’m reading a book written in the 20s at the moment, a kind of literary criticism and history about the Goliards. The writer — Helen Waddell — writes like a waterfall, says little (that I can use), and what she DOES often says in Latin. The writing carries you along like a raft on a river at high flow, and when you get to the end of the page, you don’t know what you read. It’s a kind of verbal feast but wow. Not helping me. Here’s a random example…

O admirabile Venus idolum

and still more significant in promise, the alba of the Vatican MS. of St. Martial of Limoges. The alba is more precious for its Provencal burden than for other merit: it still holds to Predentius, and the cry might be to waken faithful souls rather than sleeping lovers, the enemy in ambush the Enemy of souls rather than the jealous guardian. But in its own exquisit phrase,

“Dawn is near: she leans across the dark sea.”

Interestingly, she’s EXPLAINING poetry that makes more sense than she does. I’m through three of the chapters and so far the book says, Chapter One, “The Goliards (and the entire church!) was influenced by secular Latin poetry more than they like to acknowledge.” Chapter Two, “There was a transitional moment when the Church tried shaking off the sensual (if not libidinous) secular influence, but they really couldn’t do it. They got some lovely lines, though.” And Chapter Three, “A group rebelled against the church rather quietly and wrote poetry intending to mimic Church verses. Mostly this was in Latin, but after a while, they began writing in their own languages. There are some quite nice things in Middle High German.”

The most comprehensible thing to me in the first chapter were two lines of Dante in Italian. This was after a small flash flood of Latin that had left me dumbfounded, so Dante was a relief. I actually thought, “Hey, I can read that!” As the book progresses into territory I know (the Irish monks and scholars, Columbanus and Gall) I feel a lot better, but wonder why no one ever made me read Virgil? What have I missed?

The thing is, she LOVES this stuff, just plain LOVES it. She gushes like a, oh, I already said that.

She, herself, is an interesting woman, and I wish I could have known her. She was born in China; her parents missionaries. So far she has compared some lines of some poems to some lines of some poems by the Chinese poet, Pai Chuyi. I know his story and his work, so for me that was a log to hold onto in this torrent of words. She must have had incredible linguistic abilities, too.

In a way, she seems to be the Jackson Pollack of thought, but I know it was a different world in 1927 when she wrote this book. People read differently and many had a classical education. And my needs as a writer? Facts. But I know facts are scanty for life in the 10 – 13th centuries, it’s just that I have this THING of showing how NOT dark the “Dark” Ages were. Maybe they’re dark because the people and their lives are buried under time’s detritus and we (too easily?) accepted a random Italian painter’s definition of the Renaissance? (My opinion…)

The book is good exercise for my lazy brain. I keep imagining these young disenchanted clerics and their “amoral” lives, the moment they stopped writing their irreverent verses in Latin and started writing in (that bastard!) Italian and (that barbaric language) German. I imagine them going, “Fuck this!” (which I wanted to write in Latin but Google Translate is NOT helpful giving me — as Latin synonyms a range of NON-synonyms such as “Fortuna”).

But maybe it wasn’t like that…

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/wednesday-rdp-feast/

Rosebuds

I’ve begun reading the Goliard poetry. The commentary/introduction to the Goliards of the book I’m reading, Wine, Women and Song by John Addington Symonds irked me big time yesterday. It was all Renaissance this Renaissance that and you know, that bugs me. The way historians conventionally talk about the Renaissance you’d think all that just SPRANG out of nothing, that people lived their primitive, un-Roman, grubby little lives until, voilá, Leonardo. The book is around 150 years old, but that notion lingers on.

This historian compared Goliard poetry to Renaissance poetry and, IMO, that requires a time machine. If I were an intellectual living in the 1880s I’d be tempted to look more at INFLUENCE than comparison, but not this guy. I wanted to hit him over the head with a mallet. An example — at the end of a long and beautiful love poem, the benighted Mr. Symmonds writes:

It would surely be superfluous to point out the fluent elegance of this poem, or to dwell farther upon the astonishing fact that anything so purely Renaissance in tone should have been produced in the twelfth century.

I want to throttle him.

It’s funny to me how we name historical epochs (for our convenience) and then go on as if it were a real thing. “Hey, Leonardo, dude, here’s what I’m thinking. Renaissance? What’s your take on that? Like it? I think it’s a hell of a marketing stragedy for my badass ceiling and sculptures.”

“Mike, leave me alone. I’m writing secrets backwards.”

Yesterday I read this 12th century exhortation to love (remember, these are songs):

THE INVITATION TO YOUTH.
No. 8.

Take your pleasure, dance and play,
Each with other while ye may:
Youth is nimble, full of grace;
Age is lame, of tardy pace.

We the wars of love should wage,
Who are yet of tender age;
‘Neath the tents of Venus dwell
All the joys that youth loves well.

Young men kindle heart’s desire;
You may liken them to fire:
Old men frighten love away
With cold frost and dry decay.

For some reason, it reminded me of THIS (written during the Renaissance):

To the Virgins to Make Much of Time
Robert Herrick, 1591 – 1674

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former. 

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

The Carmina Burana is filled with songs on this theme.

What IF (and this is a revolutionary thought) one thing leads to another?

But I’m not fair to Mr. Symmonds. His job was to open the minds of his readers to the notion that the Middle Ages were NOT a Dark Ages. He used the handholds he had to do this. I’m not exactly the audience for whom he was writing and I bet the audience he hoped to reach got his point which was, “Hey, these are really cool and beautiful songs kind of like all that stuff you like from the Renaissance!”

There are HUNDREDS of Goliard songs. I can’t imagine that they just lurked in dark taverns with iconoclastic young clerics. I’d bet they were EVERYWHERE these wandering scholars went in their, uh, wandering. I bet LOTS of non-wandering scholars — you know, just people? — knew them. I bet they had a larger influence than we know or the Church would not have wanted so badly to stem the tide of disillusioned drunken libidinous clerics wandering Europe, looking for teaching jobs and criticizing the hypocrisy of the church.

The OTHER egregious thing Mr. Symmonds does is compare some of the church-criticizing poetry to the Reformation. Again, that requires a time machine. BUT…WE look at the Reformation as a discrete event in history that sprang up spontaneously (simultaneous to the Renaissance?) but it wasn’t. Symmonds even opens his book with a quotation from Martin Luther. Again, for his Post-Reformation readers, that could strike a chord legitimizing the redemption of the “Dark Ages”.

The British art historian, Waldemar Januszczak, in his series for the BBC The Renaissance Unchained makes a good case (pretty much my case). His argument is that the Renaissance is Papist propaganda designed to combat the Reformation. When I began watching the series a year or so ago, and he made that point, I cheered. I’m not casting aspersions on so-called Renaissance art at all (it’s amazing), but those guys were PAID to paint and sculpt what they did to convey the message the Church wanted them to.

Do I like the songs/poems I’m reading? Not a lot, actually, but what’s behind them is very attractive. A whole world. Reading one spring/love/sex poem after another brought me to poor old Faust on Easter, bewailing his age and all the years he’d spent in study rather than gathering rosebuds.

That roses have thorns is, maybe, the wisdom of old age.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/mallet/

Dame Fortune

Back in the goodle days of the Middle Ages people had a philosophical stance in relation to the moment in which they were living. Everything turned on the “wheel of fortune” — something more than mere “luck” and maybe not as dark as “fate.”

It was cosmic and whimsical; everyone had their turn. Of course people tried to influence their position through prayer, alms, going on a crusade, but as far as I can understand it the Wheel of Fortune was not quite the same as Divine Providence though everything does rest in the hand of God. If anything, faith could make the darker spins on the wheel a little more bearable. In any case, the Wheel of Fortune cannot spin you into Hell or Heaven. It was an earthly thing, a way of explaining all that was inexplicable.

Still, it is human nature to seek causation beyond the will of the divine and hope, somehow, to change their position on Fortune’s Wheel.

Not all medieval people were monks, peasants and lords. Some of them were itinerant scholars like the Goliards. Definitely a category apart, they were young clerics who wandered in search of work, usually live-in positions teaching the sons of nobles (they hoped). It’s difficult to see them as religious people. Much of what we know of them is from the amazing manuscript, Carmina Burana.

The Wheel of Fortune has a BIG role in that immense collection of poetry composed primarily in Latin and German. Carl Orff put some of the songs to music; I like Ray Manzarek’s version of Orff’s composition. Here is the poem sung in this song.

Sors immanis et inanis, rota tu volubilis, status malus, vana salus semper dissolubilis, obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris; nunc per ludum dorsum nudum fero tui sceleris. . . . . . . . . . . Fortune rota volvitur; descendo minoratus; alter in altum tollitur; nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice caveat ruinam! nam sub axe legimus Hecubam reginam.

Fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, status is bad, well-being is vain always may melt away, shadowy and veiled you plague me too; now through the game bare backed I bear your villainy. . . . . . . . . . The wheel of Fortune turns; I go down, demeaned; another is carried to the height; far too high up sits the king at the summit – let him beware ruin! for under the axis we read: Queen Hecuba.

In the Carmina Burana the poem that most beautifully (to me) depicts the Wheel of Fortune is the lament of a swan who has found he is now dinner. It’s a real swan song…

Once I lived on a lake

Once I was beautiful

When I was a Swan

(Chorus)

Woe is me!

Now I’m burned black

roasting fiercely!

The servant turns the spit
roasting me in the fire
Now the steward serves me up

(Repeat chorus)

Now I lie on a plate
no longer able to fly
Now I see gnashing teeth

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/fortune/