Earlier this week a book review in The Huffington Post titled “Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel: Surviving and Recording Evil,” got my attention. Why? It was a little over six years ago that Society of the Fifth Cave member, Dave Parsons selected Martel’s Booker Prize winning book, Life of Pi. The book is an excellent read, which I highly recommend. Now Beatrice and Virgil is now on my reading list.
The name Yann Martel not only caught my eye for Life of Pi, but also his involvement in helping to launch onedrop.org last fall in which he wrote a prose poem (What The Drop of Water Had To Say) heard around the globe as part of Guy Laliberté’s Poetic Social Mission in Space. The founder of Cirque du Soleil® and One Drop became Canada’s first private explorer in space, during which time his Poetic Social Mission in space took place.
Parts of Martel’s poem, with each stanza touching one one particular theme to do with water, was read at each of the 14-city performance orchestrated from space orchestrated from space by of Guy Laliberté. Here’s Martel’s first stanza:
Montreal
Sun and Moon were arguing, again.
Brother and sister, they’d wandered the Universe
and found in this corner a good home.
Sun adored being the star of the show,
so many admiring planets spinning in his orbit.
Moon, more modest, was drawn to Earth.
Now Moon was looking at her brother glumly.
“What’s the matter?” asked Sun.
“My planet is drying up,” replied Moon.
“Earth, that speck of dirt? Why do you care?”
“Because it’s my garden. I love Earth,” Moon pouted,
as she slid into a lunar eclipse so she wouldn’t have to see her brother.
“If Earth is drying up,” continued Sun, “why don’t you adopt a nicer planet?
There’s Saturn, for example, or Jupiter, they’re both impressive.”
“You don’t understand anything. You’re the dimmest of stars!” bawled Moon.
“Is that so?” huffed Sun, bursting with solar storms.
“Excuse me,” came a small voice from planet Earth.
“What?” said Sun and Moon together. “Who are you?”
“I’m a drop of water,” said Drop of Water. “I need your help.”
Source: onedrop.org
kenne
