Mère Lusine
(Text by Giulia Barbarossa)
I.
High atop the cliffed grey mountain stone
and down below in the Alzette river
sat a young maiden, her story well-known,
her hair deep golden, and her eyes bright silver.
Naked, she played in the gloomy green stream
as water-moss and seaweed mottled her hair
and the cold slice of moonlight enveloped her in its gleam.
She looked up wistfully at the castle in the air.
Up the Bockfiels she would sometimes tread,
humming a soft melody as she went along.
Always, she came home alone, with a baker’s loaf of bread
until one day a noble man followed her enchanting song.
II.
Hand in hand, and clad in white,
dripping in colourful cut-glass,
the couple withdrew from the chapel into the dazzling
daylight and walked up to the castle through velvet grass.
Newly-wed, she barefooted through the halls of Lucilinburhuc
and into her bathing chamber she would sneak at early dawn,
when her husband betrayed her wish for privacy, through the keyhole he looked
and, to his shock, a scaly serpent-tail he came upon.
And so the maiden was bruised by betrayal,
as she sank through the bathtub and into the castle floor she fled,
forever doomed to hide in the stone’s veil.
Only her stray strands of hair remained, gathering around the drain like a golden thread.
III.
Every septennial, the serpent-maiden returns
to visit her beloved Bockfiels, the castle in the sky no more than a hollow tooth.
She traverses downward, through the Klouschtergaart’s dewy thorns searching
for those that do not fret over her fearsome sooth.
Her bare feet pitter-patter along the riverbanks of Clausen
and slowly make way to the entrance of the Casemates
to escape the nightclubs’ many lights – it must be a thousand!
and find someone that will release her of this fate.
The maiden emerges in the high city, in her ears the cathedral bells drum
and to the tune she dances along, spinning in circlets with the Lady of
Gold. The golden key on her tongue had slowly turned it numb
and without brave help, she fears that Luxembourg would sink into the stone as foretold.