Challenging Poetry

Albania: And What Shall I Do in Illyria

I found music in Illyria—
lyrics and harmonies
that spoke of loss and sorrow,
inconstancy and foolishness,
and love—
so many loves,
so many fools. ladies and dukes,
sisters and brothers,
clowns and drunkards—
their melodies interweaving
into a promise of truth
past all dreaming.

I feasted on it—
dining on music
and praying that love would die,
but it grew, spreading through Illyria
like a storm,
changing the landscape
into something new,
something different.

I opened my mind to it—
the orchestra swelled and crashed,
loves were lost and won,
lives created and destroyed.

Author's Note ▶︎

In ancient times, Albania was called Illyria--which brought me to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night where the first line reads:
If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.

The play is a comedy of mistaken identities--Viola dresses as a man to wait for her brother, and in the mean time, falls in love with a duke who is in love with a duchess who falls in love with Viola. And then there's the secondary triangles and Malvolio who thinks the duchess is in love with him . . . all sorts of complicated. One of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays.