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Um, this actually,
this is a new poem that

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comes of dealing with so much
sham, so much hollowness.

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How do you deal with that?

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The public world that
feels empty and hollow,

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and the private one in
which we're losing friends.

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Beloved irreplaceable people.

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What in the world to make of
all that hollowness and all

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that loss.

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And then I remembered the
Greek myth of Pan and Syrinx.

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Then the poem wrote itself.

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If you don't recall it,
or don't know the story,

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briefly it goes that Pan, who
is the goat footed god of nature

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was very hot for a
nymph named Syrinx.

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She was desperate to
escape him and then

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maybe she was shouting me too.

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She called on the river
nymphs who transformed her

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into a bed of reeds.

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And it was from those reeds
that Pan bound together

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the musical instrument
we call the pan pipes,

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or the syrinx, which was
one of the earliest woodwind

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instruments.

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The music lives on
primarily in Peru.

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The great players
of the pan pipes.

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And of all the songs
of that region, the one

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that took over this poem and
its pan pipes, El Condor Pasa.

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It's the most
haunting of them all.

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If you don't know it, you
can hear it on YouTube.

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"The uses of what is hollow.

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El Condor Pasa, do you
hear that haunting sound,

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uncanny in its beauty?

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Pan pipes of Peru that
mime the sound of wind,

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the spread of wings, the
beauty of the condor high

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above the Andes.

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Glory in the past.

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And when Pan thought
he had captured her,

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he held instead only
the tall marsh reeds.

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And made of hollow loss, a song.

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And of the vultures
circle overhead,

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such music that every reed
could sing when given breath.

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Pure melody born of
wind and emptiness.

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So piercing and so high.

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El Condor Pasa overhead.

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Look up.

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No, higher.

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Do you see him now?

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His wings out spread, the V
that children draw when they

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mean bird, and far, and sky.

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The wonder gives the
emptiness its size.

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In search of death on which
it feeds, and as it flies,

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the pan pipes play.

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The music is so lovely it
could stop the breath."

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