lost lives

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.

And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be
If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me
I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.

I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.

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a friend introduced me to declan galbraith, this english boy-singer who was only eight when this clip was recorded. the song was danny-boy, one of the first irish songs i learnt for music class back in assumption primary school. the tune brought back pictures of my childhood...here with blackie and many years later as an undergrad with bobby. these two dogs of mine grew up together. i remember picking them both from a litter of puppies and christianed them with my sister.
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blackie stayed with a distant auntie and was eventually sent to the pound, without our knowledge. i remember him leaping up to greet us each year when we visited him. i was too young to question why nor see the pain the kind of decision could have inflicted upon him. blackie remembers us till the end. i live on with heavy regret that i could not be there for blackie when he died, old, forgotten and alone. images of him forcefully dragged up with wires up a truck still return to haunt me.

bob led a fuller life. he was small enough to move with us into a flat. bobby lived to a ripe old age but had to be put down because of cancer. i kept my promise this time and was with him till he breathed his last. i was 24 then, and always thought my eyes were born with no tear-ducts. i wept like a child when the vet placed his limp body in my arms. he whined in acute pain, not physical in form, and gradually fell silent when the drug took effect... i sometimes still ask if he wondered why he was allowed to die...even as he breathed his last.

with age and maturity, we grow to confront wider concerns and different kinds of death or injustice that surround us. sung by the same boy, this second song throws me into present time, and bullets my conscience with its final lines. my early affinity with my pets leads me to a different terrain altogether. whoever said childhood is devoid of pain must be blind. those who preach about moral gaps in today's world without a sense of their own may falter or fail. i bear no neat answers to the questions posed by the boy. still, there is a voice inside him that draws me home to that first gaze when God bends down and hears this prayer- our heartsongs about a our lost & secret past entwined with stories of other lives, received and reclaimed.

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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere its setting...
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

william wordsworth: intimations