Silly Cyrano!
All men have their nose
to face.
A second test of courage,
lest a hulking torso
have chicken legs.
Feather,
broken
and alone.
dedicated to Anonymous
by Dave Brubeck, The Younger
c. 2025 David William Brubeck. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cyrano, greatest and most fearless rapier duelist in France! Masterful poet! Producer of honest revelations about his love and emotion? No.
Imagining that women loved with their eyes, like many men, Cyrano was sure that his beloved Roxanne would never fall in love with him with due to his ridiculous nose and diminutive stature. That Roxanne would surely prefer his handsome but dimwitted rival for her affection. Rather than have the courage to risk rejection, he provides his rival with witty sayings and heartfelt words to woo his beloved Roxanne. In an irony of bittersweet success, his rival and Roxanne are betrothed, but fate intervenes and the rival is summoned to war and killed.
While Cyrano considers Roxanne his one victory-a white plume, she enters a convent in despair and leads what appears to be a life of heartache and sorrow without her true love. Cyrano lacks the courage to reveal that it was he who was the intellect, the heartfelt words and the very soul of her lover. Rather than risk her rejection, Cyrano continues the lie, and seeks only the morsels of her presence as a dutiful friend. Can true “best-friend” status be built on such a lie? Perhaps too scared to risk losing all access, or more scared still of winning her, and the perfect dream of love becoming imperfectly real.
Thus the love of the great fictional poet is reduced to the hypothetical of the merest of philosophers, and constrained by cowardice to a prison of lies!
Roxanne lives on, heartbroken, thinking her love dead, when his essence breaths and speaks to her each visit.
A tragedy of incomplete courage.
Of words unspoken…..
Summer
You old Indian summer
You’re the tear that comes after
June-time’s laughter
You see so many dreams
That don’t come true
Dreams we fashioned
When summertime was new
You are here to watch over
A heart that is broken
By a word that somebody
Left unspoken
You’re the ghost of a romance in June
Going astray
Fading too soon
That’s why I say
Farewell
To you
Indian Summer
“Indian summer”, this version by Victor Herbert, music & Al Dubin, lyrics
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