Lament for Lokomotiv

I mentioned this one, the second of my magnum opuses (damn, I still haven't looked up the opi/opuses thing) in the previous post.  But I figured I'd post it here even though no one expressly requested it - not that I expected that to happen.

First, some background.  You really need to know about the circumstance before, I think, you can truly appreciate it (which, you don't have to do, although I'd actually kind of appreciate it, especially because this isn't some small song which comes from within me and doesn't touch anything other than my highly-coloured fantasy world but actually entails so many other people and emotions greater than any about which I had previously written, except maybe in "Do You Feel Safer Now," and that was still from my perspective, whereas in this one, I'm kind of both omnipresent and invisible).  Okay, take a breath from reading that run-on, and let's continue.

My love for hockey is a broad kind of love.  For certain players, for my team, for the league, for championships, and for the sport in general.

I'm also human.  With feelings (as explained in a previous post).  So, when a plane carrying an entire hockey team crashed last September, my reaction to the news was twofold.  (It was 7 September, to be precise; I'll never forget it.)  Plus it was extreme.

And I am in no way implying that my reaction was in any way akin to that of the forty-four families which lost loved ones that day - I can not even begin to consider the depth and endlessness of their grief.

I happened to be eating breakfast when my Twitter feed began to explode with the news.  I immediately put aside my small bowl of apple cinnamon oatmeal (I never finished it), and read everything I could about the crash.  Nothing was certain yet, but there was much about which to be trepidatious.  I was already well-versed in flight list and speculations about it when I rushed off to class - trying, under heavy grey skies and a light drizzle, to outrace my mind spinning with fears.  I learned nothing in my fifty-minute French class, only how to repeatedly and surreptitiously check my phone (it was actually my iPod; my phone was broken) for Twitter updates while sitting in the front row, and how not to get caught in the act.  My next class, Victorian Literature, was in my school's library, so I crossed the street and started climbing the stairs to the sixth floor.  Between floors two and three, I read all of the new tweets, and my eyes first landed on the confirmation of Alexander Vasyunov's death.  And then Karel Rachunek's.  I started hyperventilating so badly, I got massively dizzy.  The latter player, especially, was one I really liked and admired.  I wasn't crying, yet; it was just a wave of disbelief.  And then came all of the other stories and confirmations and statistics and, and pictures.  I all but willed myself up the stairs, waited for my professor to come, asked to be excused from class, ran back to my dorm (in the rain, fittingly), and threw up.  Twice.  When that was over, I started crying.  And began researching the lives of everyone who was killed, because there had to be a way for me to commemorate them properly.  (Irrelevant: I also had hot soup for dinner, because it felt like a warm hug, one I really needed.)

Six months later, there was this.

I should mention that I took an altogether fairly drastic step with this song of mine: I sent a copy of the lyrics out to a few hockey-related places, recently.  So far, no one has written back to me, which I understand.  But, to accompany it, I sent out a letter, so what follows by way of explanation I am taking directly verbatim from the letter I sent out:

"As an amateur songwriter, and lover of words and the way they fit together, my natural instinct was to bring pen to paper, and that very night, I began to set down the way I felt.  Six months later, what was meant to be a concise yet personal outporing of grief had become a lengthy yet meticulously-organised and -detailed eulogy.  Its evolution was rather complex.  At some point during the drafting of the piece, I decided to commemorate every hockey-related person who had died aboard the ill-fated plane - even the administrators and the equipment trainers.  (The flights staff, regrettably, were difficult to fit into it, and therefore were not included.  That is, however, not a commentary on the importance of their lives.)

"To that end, I set about researching each man, so as to be best able to find a word which captured his essence and which, once placed in the poem/song, would be distinctly his own.  I spent hours poring over team websites, blog posts, scouting reports, video, hockey message boards, newspaper and internet articles, and interviews, in order to find the one word to describe each person, and then even more hours obsessing over the correct wording and/or phrasing.  Some words came easily, by association: "iron," for example, befitted Karlis Skrastins, who set the ironmark mark for NHL defensemen.  Some were easy to choose for the wealth of information available: Pavol Demitra, among others, generated many words before I settled on "home," for his particular brilliance playing for his native Slovakia.  The hardest, and most heartbreaking, were those men for whom there was little to no information; these words, then, had to be taken from associations I had with their names or birthplaces: massage therapist Vyacheslav Kuznetsov, for example, has the word "black," because his surname translates to "blacksmith" from Russian; or, for young left winger Artem Yarchuk, I chose the word "art," taking a portion of his first name.  In total, there were 37 such meaningful words.

"Further, to really add greater significance to what I was writing, I ensured that every verse, of which there are four, had exactly eleven lines, so that the sum would come to 44, a total to mirror the ultimate number of casualties.  There are also certain words and phrases which refer to the situtation in general: "locomotive," for example; or, "gold"/"silver"/"cups" to indicate those winners of medals and/or trophies from various competitions."

So, there's that introduction to the song.

I should also mention, and this is a rare occurrence as of late, that I have no melody for the song in mind.  For the chorus, yes.  But for the verses, no.  I'd begun to see it as a spoken-word song (which sounds just as oxymoronic as "prose poem," but there it is).  The verses, then, would be spoken, and the chorus mournfully sung.

And, although this is a song that could be continually evolved and fixed and changed and perfected further, I decided it was finished on 7 March 2012.  That was exactly six months, half a year since the crash.  To tell you how many times I teared up writing the song would be to damage my already-fragile reputation, I'm sure.  But really, the third verse, which I was composing in January, still gets me.  The part about the wings....holy cow.

Finally, for your convenience, I will try to attach to this post a .pdf download for you to upload to your computer (if you'd like), in which there are three copies of the song: one, an unmarked version; the second, one which highlights and explains the meaningful words for the people; and the third, which illustrates and explicates the other allusions.  Try clicking here, and then let me know if it worked, please.  I'm ever so unpractised with things like this.

Lament for Lokomotiv

take my hand, this day is far too long for us to walk through it alone

and as the sky grows blacker, the sun leaves and takes with it all that we’ve known

though night has fallen, it’s still early to look up at all of the new stars

because the distance between them and us has just become way too far

and it’s a little too much to give up to get next to where they are

to the east, the tide is rising, and soon the river will wash its banks clean

but to the west, we are lighting candles, with none of us able to sleep

music and moments swirl around me, and all I can do is to stand there

I can’t breathe, and I’m hugging myself, numbly, because I’m just that scared

and I’d rather forever repeat yesterday than to move forward too soon

because now I know that growing older means getting sadder, too

CHORUS:

so let the plane take you high, high, higher than you’ve ever been

and I will stay and keep watch, watch, watching the taillights get dim

suddenly you won’t be here, here, hearing a sound

everything will be still

close your eyes, none of us is meant to look upon this haunting sight

all the gold, the fire, the silver, the red mixed with water and ice

that was brought to life, and left behind, but at least you were not alone

was there fear, was there redemption, were there thoughts of home?

between the trees, the sticks, and the towering piles of stone

oh, if only we could save so much more from this mass of splintered iron

than the ultimate proof that with clipped wings, nothing is able to fly

I half-doubted when they said it, lover and believer that I am

but it and chance rewrote the week, the week which started with a traffic jam

somehow this day would have passed as any other without one fateful mistake

but then, just as something new was starting, someone applied the brakes

CHORUS:

so let the plane take you high, high, higher than you’ve ever been

and I will stay and keep watch, watch, watching the taillights get dim

suddenly you won’t be here, here, hearing a sound

everything will be still

take a bow, the curtain's closing, and without warning, the players have to leave

we’ve seen this happen before, when the last to breathe are the first to cease

it’s a vision of hours ducking in line, forming swiftly-flowing days,

of time which passes like a motor, and flies into a ringing-bell haze

and rests itself among bouquets of holly, dill, and praise

today, we gather the flowers and pretend we know how to grieve

in the dear, hopeless hopes that it all turns out to be make-believe

but there you were, and here we are, accompanied forever after

by traces of bright shadows and echoes of resounding laughter

we’ll listen, but the rest will fade away, like the earliest birdcalls of spring

where will the winds of the Earth lead you, now that you’ve put on your wings?

CHORUS:

so let the plane take you high, high, higher than you’ve ever been

and I will stay and keep watch, watch, watching the taillights get dim

suddenly you won’t be here, here, hearing a sound

everything will be still

take a breath, it’s time to watch as, all around, dream-like normalcy returns

there’s a heart still beating, and the light put in the window still burns

looking past it, you might see your face in the seeds you planted

not in the cups you held, the gifts you got, or in chairs left disenchanted

those now little more than cheap art from days taken for granted

the scene is heavy with a quiet no whistle or footfall will break

maybe if we hadn’t loved so much, we might’ve escaped this deep ache

and uncertainty wouldn’t have fit into our altered picture of tomorrow

eventually, we’ll find our way back to solid ground, and we won’t let go

but for now, a chill that has nothing to do with the weather descends

because the ride of the promising locomotive has come to an end.

...Remember, you are under no obligation to like it, just because it's about a tragedy and I poured my life's blood into it.

Much love, and thank you for the musik,

Just Another Ordinary Girl

Hold on tight, 'cause it don't happen twice - don't miss your life.