The bells that still can ring

“The birds they sang at the break of day.  Start again I heard them say. Don’t dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.” — Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem‘ Image: Su Leslie, 2016. Edited with Snapseed.

As if this week hasn’t been bad enough, Leonard Cohen has died.

Although best known as a singer-song-writer, I discovered Cohen first as a poet. Allowed to choose the book I’d be given as the science prize in my fifth form year, I chose The Spice-Box of Earth.

I have no real idea why, or even how the only book-shop in a small New Zealand timber-town came to stock a volume of Canadian poetry published sixteen years before I bought it (the year I was born in fact).

But I’m glad that I did. I don’t know how many times in the last forty years I’ve been grateful to Leonard Cohen for putting into words (and music), ideas and feelings that I struggled to articulate.

Today Anthem seems particularly appropriate, especially (and not surprisingly) the line:

… There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in …

And that’s what I’m hoping. That somehow, in the darkness of hatred, fear and uncertainty that envelops us, the light of love and peace and tolerance will find a way in. I don’t hope that in an abstract “she’ll be right, mate” kind of way, but because I believe that there are enough people who recognise the truth in Edmund Burke‘s statement that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

I’m offering this post for Sally D’s Mobile Photography Challenge at Lens and Pens by Sally. This week’s theme is nature, and right now escape into the natural world seems to offer great solace. It is also of course, very much threatened by any denial of climate change, so even in comfort there is fear.

Let’s hope we really can make the light get in.