The Last Love Poem
"Never forget you were made in wild joy"
Wishing survival – and solace – for all those whose lives become caught in war and civil strife, irrespective of cause, place, or era ...
“Did I show you this picture of my sweetheart
Taken of us before the war
Of the Greek and his Italian girl
One Sunday at the shoreWe tied our ribbons to the fire escape
They were taken by the birds
Who flew home to the country
As the bombs rained on the world”1
– Patty Griffin, “Making Pies” (2002)23
The Last Love Poem would have in it a mother, a child in a cellar, hiding as the sky began its falling. (Look what's left of the place where they were hiding: a diary, a scrap of bread, a toy.) And then, very softly, as the bootsteps came, a mother lifting water to the child's lips saying your father was like soft rain in my orange trees. Never forget you were made in wild joy.
When I first heard this unexpected stanza, which begins at 1:50 in that YouTube video, and learned in hindsight how the narrator’s now-elderly life had been irrevocably changed, I was gutted.
2002 is the release year for the album, “1000 Kisses,” on which Patty Griffin’s song “Making Pies” first appeared. Griffin sang this song publicly as early as the Stanford Lively Arts (possibly now renamed to Stanford Live) "Concert for a Landmine Free World" on December 1, 1999. You can view a video of that performance here.
There’s a deeply insightful and personally revelatory review of Patty Griffin’s “Making Pies” on Alan Albee’s blog, “Words to Live By…,” on September 30, 2019.
Joseph Fasano shared “The Last Love Poem” on X / Twitter on November 29, 2023.
If this post might leave you in a drear or somber place, Fasano also shared this observation with his son, two months earlier: “Hatred always says the same thing but love is all the songs of the world.” (The flip side of Leo Tolstoy’s “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)
As well, Griffin’s ambiguous reassurance song, “When It Don’t Come Easy” – with lyrics such as “all of the signs got blown away” and “when the last bird falls” – reminds of the enduring power of personal connection and love in the face of horrors, whether natural or human-caused.
My God, Joseph Fasano! Breathtaking.
Judeo-messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only reinforced the old Jewish narrative. They are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond peoples, races, cultures) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in our media, in our popular culture, at our universities, and on our streets have ended up reducing our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride to its minimum expression.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are death cults originating in the Middle East and totally alien to Europe and its peoples.
Sometimes we wonder why the European left gets along so well with Muslims. Why does an often overtly anti-religious movement side with a fierce religiosity that seems to oppose almost everything the left has always sought to defend? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
Don Rumsfeld was right when he said, "Europe has shifted on its axis," it was the wrong side that won World War II, and it becomes clearer every day . . . What has NATO done to defend Europe? Absolutely nothing . . . My enemies are not in Moscow, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh or some ethereal Teutonic bogeyman, my enemies are in Washington, Brussels and Tel Aviv.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire