w
wOud ww23 August 2011
We split the grain once more
of strange tunes and sharpened
trees, raining on sunburst drums
and blue-stringed ouds
Each voluptuous belly,
humming, stark, fig-wooded,
pausing, folding the centuries,
desertly swaying and crying
We let them linger, doubling
each note in its olive abyss;
swooping, phasing and calling
the ash-god roots of the sun
You
find ouds all over the Mediterranean. The instrument is very ancient,
dating back to at least the 8th Century. My own oud is Turkish, with eleven
strings in five pairs plus a single bass string. The string length is
slightly shorter than an Arabic oud
All poems and other texts on this site are the copyright of Richard Edward Hugh Castellan 2009