Tonight in dVerse Poets Pub Dora has delighted and intrigued us by her examples of poets employing mottos/mantras of repeating phrases, following the axiom: repetita juvant, which she translates as “it’s useful to repeat things”.

Wanting to know more about the Latin phrase, I put it into a search engine (I use Ecosia, thus supporting tree planting as I search) and came up with the eponymous title of a single track by Carlo Maver on Spotify. Here two – then three – flutes interweave over an insistent, repeating drum bass.

You might enjoy it, and then better understand the poem I wrote spontaneously from it, while I had this track on ‘repeat’.

A poem written today on what would have been my late mother’s 107th birthday. And also linked with number 1 of Johannes Brahms’ Three Intermezzos, Opus 117 (based on an old Scottish lullaby) which she, Lecky Nickless Labrum, played for me. On the mellow-sounding forty-year-old piano that her parents Beattie (nee Riley) and Joe Nickless had scrimped and saved to buy her in the 1930s, when she was in her teens, and showing a gift for playing classical music.

Repetita juvant

I tracked it down on Spotify.
I pressed repeat; it did not lie,
but oh my Wi was very Fi:
Repetita juvant

It would have been Mum's greater dearth
of cent-and-seven years on this Earth.
today. But hers a lesser birth:
Repetita juvant

She often quelled my quer'lous cry
and wiped my tears, and bade me lie
upon the pillow. "Sleep now! Try!"
Repetita juvant 
 
One birthday, music came from Brahms:
Three Intermezzos: One.     It calms
as if I lay still in her arms:
Repetita juvant

The flutes were breathy; so was I,
tied first double,  bi- to tri-.
Their motif had a bass reply:
Repetita juvant

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 22 October 2024