literature

The Language of Music

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Literature Text

Many fingers walk over ivory years.
Some lithe and gentle,
Others stumble, clumsy, unsure of where to go.
Small soft hands that skip down from beginning to end.

Notes bind months, bind years.
The memory of sound never fades.

Lush carpets used to hold me; walls clothed with ornate paper.
Strings would resonate throughout vast rooms draped in velvet.
A  carved border surrounds me, as if made of gilt.
Almost a mirror image of the vaulted, cream, frame above me.
Embellished with roses, trailing for hours, fitting together with lady curls.
Single pane windows draped in heavy burgundy would scatter light
Across  a soft golden carpet.

There delicate fingers would talk to me,
Spending more minutes than with his own kind.
Sitting in fine suits of expensive cotton and flush lace
A signet ring entrusted with rubies.

Many lives have passed me by,
Yet his I retain at the foremost of my aged mind.
For one of so little years to know how to speak; ornamented words through black notes.
Decades crawl past, hitherto I have found none the same.

Human lives are short,
Like butterflies in a November sky.

Again a strange setting, dissimilar to the last, I sit in a stupor.
Someone sits, braced for a first attempt?
They speak...
Stiff eyelids crack open to gaze blearily around; someone is playing.

You sit at the bottom of my scale
As a minor note.
Nothing complements ivory more than ebony.
Forgive my skeptic mind,
You are Ebony,
He was ivory.
Yet when willowy fingers dance
I remember.

Tiny hammers fall, sounding a new tune,
Rococo spirals bloom up blank walls,
Drawn by some invisible hand.

If he was Summer,
Then you are winter,
Both can play a melody fit for any season.

Keep time carefully,
Lest you miss a beat.
Take me back to rooms lined with faces in ornate frames.
And when you lie down to sleep,
Leave me there.
Let them place a red rope around me: so no hand will touch me again.
But do not worry dear Ebony,
I will never forget
For the memory of sound
Never dies...
Use an object to connect the lives of two or more otherwise unrelated characters.

This was done for :icondaily-lit-deviations: summer contest [link]

Line count: 50
Word count: 354

I have proofread this to the best of my ability, and to my knowledge all punctuation and grammar are correct.

The characters in this are firstly James Burnett, and then Leroy Saunders.
They are both original characters and belong to me. :)
Also for those who may not have guessed, this is written from the viewpoint of a piano.
© 2012 - 2024 AliceTerrarium
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avfc4me's avatar
I liked this very much!