We Need a Song

---

I’ve been listening to some local artists, songwriters, musicians, who bring back perspective, insight, critique, and comfort to this, our collective life, with its delights, its sorrows. I’m not sure what would become of us without music. And sometimes I wonder, perhaps the only mitigation of the machinery of faceless bureaucracy and corporate power, and the attending loss of spirituality, is a good song. Among others, I thank these artists for saving us.

---

  We Need a Song

We need a song that knows us, yet loves us,
takes our jangled minds by hand and leads us.

We need a song that rocks us, rolls us,
breaks our troubled hearts and heals us.

We need a new emancipation song,
to rise up in defiance of Babylon.

A folk song to expel the duplicitous,
and cleanse our temples from avarice.

Give us free-form jazz, some Orleans’ fusion,
shake us, wake us, from lie and illusion.

We need a hymn to condemn, not glorify,
our dependence on violence, to satisfy.

We need a pop song to explode the ad song
that says our bodies are not beautiful.

We need a blues tune to lament and repent,
forgive us our job-lot of resentment.

We don’t need plead-you-need-you-screw-you mantras,
just a country song with manners.

We need honky-tonk and ambient, renaissance, reggae,
Beck and Stravinsky, Eno and Presley.

Say it plain: we need harmony,
a Spiritual that recalls our collective nobility.

We need a melody that bursts from the heart of earth,
like the laugh of a child — wisdom’s path.

A song like a spell, like a miracle of rest,
like the wonder of awakening to a day of peace.

A song unintended, uninvented, like a seed,
swelling in the dark ground of our deepest need.

A universal lullaby that plants our tears, our loss,
waits, germinates, in the eloquence of silence.