The Broken Rose

When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine. This little Mozart will love shoddy music in the stench of night dives. This little Mozart is condemned.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars

Mozart fought with Beethoven, it was fierce.

Mozart fought with Beethoven, it was fierce.

And Mozart threw porcelain vases into the future,

hoping to score a hit, and he called Beethoven dirt

and dirty names such as only mothers recall,

names normally hidden under umbrellas

when people walk in the mud and mutter in the rain.

There was no stopping Mozart in his youth

because he had a perfect mind, and his hearing intact.

One day he decided that the oceans are asleep

when it comes to genius, and Mozart dared Time

to wake up further and to do it any better.

Time and the oceans snored, especially

the Atlantic and Pacific, and in the course of history

events fell that smashed beautiful things,

and the pieces were scattered throughout the earth

to make a reef of bones, and plates, and art.

The oceans weren’t asleep after all when Beethoven

answered, writing down his booming message

to pulse and echo in the caverns of the past.

The earth turned red from Beethoven’s imperfections,

which came to Mozart’s perfect attention,

and Mozart fought back with a faultless rose.

Mozart’s flawless signature spread across the sky

while Beethoven’s was scrawled among the weeds,

and when Mozart held aloft his permanent rose

Beethoven coughed and tore through a spider’s web,

and it was obvious, even to the distant tympani,

to the page-turners and the sorrowful oboe,

that music will murder the composer to gain its life,

and the light of music is silver encased in cement,

and the dark of music is missing under the lamp—

at which dead Mozart arrayed his bones in a skeleton,

and dead Beethoven spit and wrung an ear with one finger.