Breathe

The Magic Mountain - 2020

It’s feeling like the end of days now summer’s nearly done

It won’t be long before we’ve seen the last of autumn’s sun

We thought the worst was over but it’s only just begun

Cos now they’re warning us about the winter that’s to come

It’s not November yet but there’s a chill that’s creeping in

Not so much the temperature as all the other things

The San Francisco sky that’s redder than the Golden Gate

The ashes of the Amazon in everything we taste

Voices crying out for the forgiveness of their sins

Bugles trumpeting a war no one could ever win

You can’t call it a fight if only one man has a gun

You can’t call it a war if the killing’s just for fun

You might call it conflict if you thought you weren’t being conned

Or think it’s entertainment if you can’t tell right from wrong

You could call it what it is but you’d have to pay the price

Of standing on the sidelines while your heart turns cold as ice

I picked up The Magic Mountain just about when this began

You probably heard of it before, the book by Thomas Mann

Set in a sanatorium before the First World War

In the Alps of Switzerland where I went once before

The strange thing was of course that while this was happening

There was another kind of Covid while I was reading him

Everyone up there was sick and some were dying too

Of a kind of lung disease that wasn’t just the flu

It’s was a thousand pages so just long enough to last

Until now in October when I started it was March

Not going to give the plot away or tell you anything

Except to say the parallels were more than interesting

Not least of all that by the end he knew what life was worth

And there was nowhere else to live it except right here on earth