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Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair that serves huge platters
of olives and fried goat brains, but here I am sitting in the pew
next to the president of the Handel Society, who tells me
I’ve taken the seat of his wife who has another engagement,
and I see her sitting next to my husband watching
Shimabam Rampapoolajib rip the throat of a nubile virgin,
then run through a seedy bar in Bangkok
and down an alley way to the Chao Phraya River,
much like the river of music flowing over me,
and the president of the Handel Society explains that in England
they stand for the Hallelujah chorus, and I assure him
we Yanks do, too, and I think of the last time I heard this music
I was with my mother in Honolulu and we both stood
as hundreds of voices soared over us like the gods exhaling
a golden brew of divine moonshine, but here in London
the chorus is only 20 voices, like a group of friends whispering
the secret to each other and maybe I’m wrong
about the Thai movie, because I’m often wrong about almost everything,
for example politics–I can’t believe my mother
continues to vote against her own best interests because her father,
dead over 50 years, voted that way, and why do people
have multiple sex partners because everyone knows about germs,
not to mention staphlococcus, fungus, MRSA, nits,
river blindness, and Ebola, and maybe the flying monsters
over Bangkok are more moving than sitting in this church
where the great musician sat and listened to his glorious aria,
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and though I don’t believe
those stories anymore than I believe in Mothra over Tokyo, I do believe
in the notes swimming over me like a river of fireflies
on a summer evening, and when the concert is over I say goodbye
to my new friend, who during the intermission
introduced me to all his friends, men in three-piece pinstriped suits
and tidy haircuts, and I walk out into the December evening,
and if there isn’t a flurry of snow there should be, and I am so alone
in this chilly night walking to the Oxford tube stop,
and I would love to see Satan bursting through the starry firmament,
but there are no stars, only a stew of fog, and let’s face it
all our monsters are bivouacked in our chests like dyspeptic soldiers
in a mercenary army, hungry, covered in warts
or contagion of some kind, too walleyed and stupid to see
they are flesh and blood and there’s a glorious song
somewhere inside waiting to be sung in a church or an opera house
or even a pub where One-Eyed Walter is playing an accordion,
while a drunk warbles on a rusty flute, and Janet, the scullery maid,
her sweet soprano like a tiny bird, fluttering out
of a corner so dark it might be mistaken for an entrance to Hell.
From On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt, 2014). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press
Barbara Hamby is the author of many collections of poetry. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
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Another knockout!!
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I couldn’t stop reading and I kept wanting to re-read lines and just couldn’t stop. So now, my heart thumping, I will go back and read it aloud. Love the British gentlemen in their striped suits and tidy hair. I once fell on ice in the street in London, and a gentleman in a striped suit, charcoal grey coat and a calm, well-bred voice, picked me up… now back to your extraordinary poem…
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I had to read this quickly and even though I read silently I felt the need for gasping breaths. For years I went to the Messiah at a church in Northern San Diego county with a big choir and the entire audience singing with them. It is both powerful and humbling to join in and I would float out into the chilly ( for us) night and be aware of the holiday lights and scent of pine and the brief sense of love and unity. (Pretty brief as I had to deal with the reality of San Diego freeways on the way home)
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Thanks, Barbara
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I am – like so many times on this site – rendered quite wordless. This poem is a rollercoaster of a controlled stream of consciousness that only a master of words and metaphors can produce. And in all its gloriousness it made me remember a day of filming a documentary in one of the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals in the South of Germany when we just came to figure out where to put the camera and, suddenly, heartbreakingly, breathtakingly the organ startled us and the choir burst into the ‘Halleluja’. Yes, even though the president of the Handel Society was quite MIA :), the mind took off in all directions. And there we left it for the day.
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A beautiful memory, Rose Mary.
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What a mad/glad rush of thoughts and feelings. It reminds me of the first time I heard Bob Dylan sing (chant) Subterranean Homesick Blues. Music lyrics would never be the same. Try reciting Hamby’s poem in a couple of long breaths. You’ll have to be quick. Her lyrics will stun with wonder.
Does she read her poem slow, to savor each thought, or whipsaw through?
She has me feeling a rapture, like listening to a raconteur who’s had a six pack of double espressos. We need more poems like this.
Brilliant stuff to read out loud at your holiday dinner table, when the verbiage is turning drowsy. It wakes one up, even more than standing up for the Messiah.
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Bob Dylan and espresso–you know me too well!
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Holy smokes! What an amazing journey this poem takes us on! 💙🌟💙
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Yes. Yes it does.
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I truly love the way Barbara’s mind sees things. Thanks for this, Michael.
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On a first reading, a Hamby poem might seem like stream of consciousness writing because she has so many clauses stringing together odd tangents, but with each re-reading the poem becomes more coherent and tightly constructed.
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I love her on first reading.
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I do too. And on a second reading, a third, a fourth… Her poems change each time I go back to them.
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Barbara Hamby is an American original.
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