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.
There are, here, the makings of a miracle: a crumbling loaf of bread, like a body that’s spent its decades in pain, and two fishes, like searching eyes, and a field of trampled grass, like a bed, overused.
There is prayer here, of the petitioning sort. There are promises consulted, passages from a holy book, quite old.
There are many fathers and mothers here, watching the dark, waiting on the sun to plant its feet on the shore.
There are friends here too, and there are partners, waiting through the night for the miracle to come.
In the grey morning light we see crumbs, unmultiplied, and the bones of two fishes.
Many are shaking with cold, everyone is hungry.
The pleats of mist lift and our eyes turn to the morning star, some believe it’s Jesus, some think it’s Venus.
The daily clouds arrive. Venus disappears.
Some of us linger, wait another day, some waver, call ourselves the dearly deserted.
Some blame themselves. Perhaps there’s something we’ve done, or failed to do.
Some stay faithful, encourage one another: explain that miracles happen, but just out of range.
The rest of us hoist each other’s burdens, link arms and start back for town.
While every anthophilous (frequenter of flowers) loves an April, I slump sad to know the frailty of such things, and to know that within every pistil, stamen, or human, lies an everlasting contradiction of coming and going. The last days of this glad April may yet turn to wet winter, the sallow window light coming through the trees says there’s trouble in the neighbour’s house, the perfect stillness of this sunrise over the gulf island will rage, in time, by fire or flood, or war — that demon, stupidly thought distant. But what of it? Why spend an April, month of poetry no less, bracing yourself, as though testing the strength of a Taser? This habit of mind, this fret, almost a craft, steeling, preparing, for the worst, what’s it cost? True, the mind’s nature is to plan and so prevent, to perceive and so invent. But what of the soul? Can the mind, through its preoccupations, starve the soul, sever itself from the heart and claim a supreme and secure domain? Can the soul’s reception of a force beyond itself, soften the heart and renew the mind? Does shame constrict the intellect, does forgiveness enlarge it? and resurrect the heart’s first instinct? If wars within, finally end, would all things change out there? O Mercy.
Weary with thought, I laid down by a daffodil, and while the morning dripped away, and the grass creased my face, there appeared, approaching, one who might have been a gardener, dark-moon face and sun-pierced feet and lanterns for eyes, who saw the hollows that worry’s erosion had made in me, then said to me, rise, and with the flat of her rake struck my shoulder, and what rang out were notes of dismay and remorse, dejection and joy, surrender and grace, swirling, entwining, transfiguring, singing me into a reckless wholeness: praise song and Singer, praise April’s trip to May, praise every month, these years, this life, the stunning frailty, praise all newborn babies, praise our deep-creased faces, praise the medicine of purring pigeon, shrieking peahen, silent falcon, praise the breeze, now visible in the dance of daffodils, mirrored in lily-clouded sloughs, praise the greens going gold and the rust-gilded hills ebbing at the rim of earth, praise the sun, the gardener, the nearing gleaner. So long April, you dark beauty, perhaps we’ll meet again.
