Asha Elijah ~ Dragon child

Asha Elijah (aka Asha & Asher Quinn) sings ’Dragon child’ from his album “Butterfly in Chains.“ CD/download soon. This song came into my soul in 3 ways. My wife described our two sons (now 28 & 24) as ’dragon children’ recently when I visited London. Meaning that she feels they are protected spiritually as they make their way in the world. No sooner do we arrive and establish roots than we are preparing to leave and return home to God, a little the wiser for this incarnation, perhaps. And I am myself a dragon child in Chinese astrology! But principally I feel that this song channels the soul of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, into whose poetry, life and times I have immersed myself recently, following an inner calling. I discover that where I now live in Lipotváros, central Budapest, I am walking the very streets he walked all his life. He married his childhood sweetheart Fanni, who survived him by 70 years, and she lived in their tiny apartment just over the road until she died there in 2014, aged 101. I must have walked past it 1,001 times without ever knowing, sometimes from 2011-2014 with Fanni inside. He was born in 1909, and his first poems were published in 1930. He died in 1944, murdered as a Jew by Hungarian fascists. He had converted to Catholicism in the 1930’s, not as a political strategy but because he felt the Christ in his soul. In 1931, his 2nd anthology of verse was banned, his humanist poetry absurdly judged as heretical and anti-Christian. By 1938 Jews, some of whose families had been Hungarian for generations, were declared ’foreigners’ without rights any longer. Next, in 1939, Hungarian Jews were conscripted into forced labour camps to serve the war effort on the side of the axis powers. Then, in 1944, some 400,000 Jews were murdered by Hungarians in Budapest and the countryside, as well as those deported to Auschwitz by Germans. I am a Jew myself, my birth mother being a Jewess whose family escaped the Russian pogroms and fled to England around the time Radnóti was born. She was born in the year his poems were banned. I have migrated to Hungary for spiritual reasons, and one thread is to explore the Hungarian Jewish issue, with a view to understanding the bigger cosmic sweep of man’s inhumanity to man. I am also a poet in song, and a Christian mystic. Poets are the most dangerous beings to ’the beast,’ to the inhuman war machine. What happened in central Europe in the 1930’s & 1940’s happened again in Hungary’s 1956 uprising, then as Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990’s, and is happening right now in Ukraine. Love, beauty, truth, goodness, imagination, creativity and innocence are slaughtered at such times by Godless, mechanistically thinking assassins, as Jesus was. Artists, thinkers & lovers are rounded up, and many perish. Love is murdered by fear; symbolism by dogma; art by militarism, and truth by propaganda. In Ukraine right now, 19 year-old Russian soldiers are killing Ukrainians indiscriminately, and raping women. In a different atmosphere, without ’the beast’ present, they would be laughing, playing and loving together. They are the same folk. My song does not directly reference Radnóti, but the music, lyrics and home-made film all feel channeled. Here is a poem of his that touches me: In your two arms In your two arms I rock silently. In my two arms you rock in silence. In your two arms I am a child, sleeping. In my two arms you are a child, listening. In your two arms you enfold me when I’m afraid. In my two arms I enfold you And I no longer fear. In your two arms even death’s silence cannot frighten me. In your two arms I overcome death as in a dream. He wrote right up until the day he died, taken to a forest and shot with 21 others, too wounded to work any longer on a forced march, as the Russians advanced and the Germans retreated. His last poems were found in his trench-coat when his body was exhumed in 1946, and sent to Fanni, who published them posthumously. I dedicate this song to the memory of Miklós Radnóti with words that came into me as a gift from God, as Radnóti’s poetry was for the Hungarians. Dragon child Protected by the angels And the hero of the sun And the shepherd of the mountain And the star of Bethlehem She will find her song Under the sea It was written just for her Her prophecy And all the cherubs And the seraphs of the sky And all the Holy mothers Bless the dragon child What treasure is this? Her heavenly kiss The thunder cries Of the dragon child The air is sweet Where lovers meet Beyond the blue He waits for you She fires her arrow Into the night And all the broken pieces Are shards of light The water flows Where love goes Beyond the pain Forgiveness reigns Into the wild Into the sun You are not defiled My darling young one Undress the moonlight And start to pray His dream is your reality I heard her say Infinity Eternity Unity Ecstasy Shine your light The day is young Shine your light My darling young one