Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

The voice isn’t beautiful, and at first, I’m disappointed, yet as the words tumble out, I feel a tingling on my skin because there’s a wildness to it—an uncommon thirst for life and other things—and I see that I don’t know this woman at all, only wish to. The song is clearly foreign. Putting it in Greek only makes it stranger. It’s about a young shepherd who falls in love with a girl he sees bathing in a lake, but he’s too afraid to say anything to her, because poor and plain as he is, what could he offer? So he decides he will trick her into loving him. He climbs a very tall and leafy tree that grows above the lake, and on that night, there’s a full moon, a huge yellow moon, and the shepherd decides that if he were to speak as the moon, convince the girl that he was not a shepherd at all, perhaps she might consider him worthy, and so he climbs the tree and in his best moon voice tells the girl he’s the moon and has got it bad. As you’d expect, the girl is sceptical at first, but listening to the moon boast of its exploits, how the seas are beholden to it, how wolves and waves and all things of the night fall under its sway, and that its home is in the sky, in proper luxury, waited on by thousands of servants—stars you’d call them—thousands upon thousands of silver flames that have no other purpose but to do its bidding, and listening to this, the young girl believes, is entranced. She had hoped for a handsome husband. A steady job, some land, maybe even a few cows, but to...