Sonnets, Shires & Starry Nights
Sonnets, Shires & Starry Nights
John Nekrasov
It’s been four months since it all began. The streets are empty now, the hospitals crammed full. Body after body is carried off into the night, with nary an empty plot to lay them. We seem trapped in a nightmare—but when we wake up, the tombstones will still stand, silent.
*
There's a moment in the recent movie 1917 where we find the protagonist kneeling by the shores of a river, dead bodies drifting silently in the water behind him. He has just escaped from what seems like hell itself, bullets whizzing past his head as he plunges into a roaring river to make his escape, clawing his way over the dead to pull himself onto the shore. As the river slows and cherry blossoms flutter down from trees overhead, the reminders of the carnage of war float like ghosts before him.
He weeps.
Kneeling on the banks of the river of death, he shudders with tears—for he can’t un-see the scenes of fire and horror and death flashing before his eyes. But as he cries with all hope gone, a song, a gentle strain he can barely make out drifts through the trees. Someone, somewhere, is singing—singing—and it pulls him like a magnet, growing ever stronger, dragging him stumbling into a clearing where dozens of soldiers sit, entranced. And before them a man stands, the woods echoing his angelic voice.
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
I'm travellin' through this world of woe
Yet there's no sickness, toil, nor danger
In that bright land to which I go
Hanging onto shreds of hope, those soldiers sit for a moment in an oasis of calm, surrounded by a power far beyond mere vocal cords, wondering when the carnage around them will come to an end.
*
As I sit in my house, staring out through the blinds at the empty streets, I find myself also wondering when the world will return to normal, when our doctors will lay aside their masks, when the bodies will stop drifting away into the night. And I can’t help but think of that man standing in a clearing.
We need voices like his. Like that lost soldier, we’ve been brought to our knees, looking upon a post-apocalyptic world we never could have imagined—and sometimes we weep too. But as artists, as creatives and poets and musicians, that pain and fear is also an opportunity, a chance for our tears to become our voice, speaking through Shires and sonnets to a world that desperately needs a reminder that all is not lost.
It’s natural to feel crushed in a moment like this, to stand by the shores of the Styx and watch TV reports in tears as bodies pile up and funerals pass by without ceremony. Through long days and longer nights, I search for the words to bring a page to life—but instead my heart settles into darkness. The world is indeed broken, and water lilies and starry nights can feel like pebbles trying to hold back the sea.
But though it may feel fruitless, paint them anyway. The most powerful stories and the most beautiful songs have always been formed in the midst of darkness, of pain and sorrow and loss. Though the earth give way, that remains the calling of the artist, that in the brokenness of this earth people might see the work we do—and in it see the face of God.
Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”
And in acknowledging the seemingly senseless suffering the world is battling, in answering the death with beauty, sonatas and folk ballads alike can bring that solidity, building a moment of peace for people who desperately need it.
As that weary soldier found, his head leaned against a tree as the faraway voice washed over him, we need that art more than we know. Though sickness and danger surround us, every stroke of a paintbrush can carry hope of that bright land beyond.
More than in the happy and gleeful and carefree times, we need beauty in today’s mourning, like cherry blossoms floating from the trees, to remind us that our existence isn’t defined by the death around us. One day we’ll make it home. The shadows that surround us will slowly give way to irresistible light.
We’ll be strangers no more.
John Nekrasov
Writer & Journalist
Photography by Joshua & Eastlyn Tolle