The Death Of Orpheus Poem by Daniel Brick

They knew they could not out do
him, those maenads screaming
in a confusion of dissonance, while
he strummed one last diatonic melody
that cut through their rage and ascended
above all violence to the hearing of his
father, the supremely calm and self-possessed
god of the lyre, Phoebus Apollo. And so they
ripped his head from his shoulders, and tossed
both head and lyre into the River Hebrus on its
course to Lesbos. They were exhausted by their
brutality, and sank into a troubled sleep.
But the head kept singing sweetly as the lyre
carried it like a barge of death into the realm
felicity. How warmly he sang, how tenderly
his voice caressed both sounds and words. Earth
was so enamored of his music that she brought
the whole of it into her being, and we earthlings
benefit from this music in birds' songs, the motion
of water, the sigh of winds and crack of thunder,
and in the harmonies of our souls in the oneness of
flesh and spirit. His voice is embodied everywhere
we call Earth, perhaps even in our identity as
Earthlings are traces of the god Orpheus. Whenever we
hear music, it is Orpheus stretching his being across
space and infusing its openness with his immense soul.