Hear the trumpets sing,
And hear the alarm bells ring!
For Bindas has arrived.
There's a nice contradiction humming under this one: trumpets and alarm bells are both calls to attention, but they carry opposite feelings — one festive, one urgent. Stacking them side by side before naming Bindas at all builds a little suspense, like the poem itself is announcing an arrival before we know what kind of entrance we're in for. That third line lands with a dry, almost theatrical finality, as though the fanfare and the panic were both simply... appropriate. The mood sits somewhere between celebration and mock-emergency, which is where the humor lives. Read again and the ambiguity is the point — is this praise or warning? The compression doesn't answer that, and it doesn't need to. It just rings both bells at once and lets Bindas's name do the rest of the work, arriving already larger than the poem describing them.
Comments