Weird How Things Change, But Stay the Same

I came across a weird little poem today. Upon finishing it, I thought of another poem so similar in thought, written over 100 years ago by my friend Claude Achille Debussy. I wish I could present his in French, because it is oh-so-much-better that way, but the stilted English translation will have to do.


Where have all the gentlemen gone?
Do women long for a tipped hat
and a kind word?
It doesn’t seem they do.

What a sad era I was born into.
I do not wish to be called an “X”.
Surely I am not alone
in feeling this way.

Through the middle of town
runs a railroad track; a skeletal remain
of a once thriving industry;
a once thriving way of life.

At the end is a caboose
faded from red to pink
by the unchanging sun.
How lonely she seems
remembering when she was wanted.
Here is my escape.

Her cracked and peeling paint flakes away
at my touch.
Weeds have grown all about her,
trying to hide her from the world.
But I see her beauty.

I climb inside
and sit upon her rotting cherry seat.
I close my eyes and imagine
being swept away to a world I miss,
yet never knew.

- Terry Cooper

The night is as sweet as a woman,
and the old trees dream under the golden moon.
They didn't know how to call to the one who just passed,
her head crowned with pearls,
now and forever distraught.

All have passed now,
the frail, the foolish,
sowing their laughter in the sparse grass,
breezes brushing
the flowering hips' charming caress.
Alas! Only a white shiver remains of all this.

The old trees weep their gilded leaves
under the golden moon.
No more will anyone dedicate to them
proud golden helms.
Now and forever tarnished,
the knights are dead
on the Grail quest.

The night is sweet as a woman.
Hands seem to stroke the souls,
such foolish, frail hands,
in the days when swords sang for them!
Strange sighs rise under the trees.
My soul, they are from an old dream that holds you.

What strikes me most is that Debussy wrote his poem mourning the loss of the good old days during the time that are Cooper's good old days. Both ask: Where have all the gentlemen/knights gone? What happened to chivalry?What do the objects left behind (caboose/trees) know about the old world? Are they crying over their loss of honor? Why am I stuck in this time, when my soul calls out for an era I never even knew?

It's weird how things change and yet stay the same.