Night Music

bubbling memory
breaks night’s deafening silence
a nightingale’s song

Kim M. Russell, 2017

My response to Carpe Diem #1314 The Nightingale

After being away due to illness, I’ve come back to the particularly lovely quatrain 72 from The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam:

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?

© Omar Khayyam (Tr. FitzGerald)

It reminds me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, with its theme of fading youth, and also of Hans Christian Andersen’s nightingale – a reminder of our past youth, perhaps.