Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, medicine, music, song on February 16, 2020| 2 Comments »
Not tea, not pills,
not herbs, not tinctures,
not creams, not salts,
not drops, not injections—
what the heart needs
tonight is a song
so true that its cells rhyme
themselves with the beat.
Tonight, the only medicine
this tired heart needs
is to listen.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, fall, leaves, meter, poem, poetry, shakespeare, song on October 17, 2019| 4 Comments »
That time of year thou mayst in me behold …. Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
And though the leaves may fall and molder,
though the winter nights get colder,
and though, my love, we both grow older,
may the choir in me that sings for you
be ever clear and ever blue—
the stream beneath your red canoe.
And though it seems that time’s a thief
and leaf subsides to crumbled leaf
and though the days are gnawed by grief,
may I sing for you forever sweet
in tunes both tame and indiscreet—
sing bare, unruined, my heart, my beat.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged erik satie, love, poem, poetry, song, time, time signature on August 27, 2019| Leave a Comment »
after Erik Satie’s Gnossienne 2
for you a song
with no measures
and this tessellating metronome
that ticks only love and slips
into each moment a forever
Dear friends,
You have perhaps guessed by now that I am doing a whole series of five-line poems on Satie’s Gnossiennes—five lines for the five lines of the staff. And each poem is titled based on the directions he wrote above the staves instructing the musician how to feel the music. There will be quite a few more … they’re really fun.
r
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, doubt, martin luther, poem, poetry, song, teaching on January 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I am afraid of the darkness and the hole in it.
—Martin Luther, “Luther”
And when Martin Luther was struck with plague
in 1527, he refused to leave the city, though he trembled,
though he burned. He felt it was the devil’s assault
sent to reduce him with despair. And reduced, he was.
There is darkness so great we lose all sense of direction,
forget even which way is in. There is darkness
so great that even the holes in the darkness are terrible,
cannot be seen as light. And in that terrible August,
the Reformer argued with God. And all that terrible August,
Luther trusted God’s promises. And he told himself,
Pray. Read. Sing. And the darkness endured.
Sometimes, Luther found, there are darknesses
so great we forget how to sing ourselves. Sometimes,
the only way through darkness, through doubt,
is to teach other people to sing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hum, improvisation, poem, poetry, song on December 15, 2018| 4 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged music, poem, poetry, song on November 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »
not just to play
the song, but to be the song—
the leaping melody,
the sullen chords,
the infinite silence inside
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connecton, poem, poetry, silence, song on October 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »
just sing, little darling, sing with me.
—Emmylou, First Aid Kit
The song does not understand
the word forsake. Though it
dances with silence, it always
returns, like petals, like morning,
like waves. The song will never
leave you. When you cannot
hear it—when the song
seems lost to your lips—
that is when it is ripening.
Let us add our voices
to the song, the song that
is singing us awake.
And let us add our silences
to it, too. How beautifully
it holds us, becomes stem,
becomes sun, becomes oar.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forgetting, memory, poem, poetry, song, traveler on September 30, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Once I knew it by heart,
that song about leaving
the earth and traveling on,
but tonight, I just hum
through the verse I’ve forgotten,
grateful the tune still knows
how to find me, grateful
to still have lips, breath.
Grateful to be a traveler
here, my feet still finding
the road.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, poem, poetry, song on July 1, 2018| 4 Comments »
Whatever an open field has always tried to say,
that’s what I long to say to you. That, and the blue thrill
that trills in the larkspur just before it blooms.
And the communion of threads in the blanket,
the sincerity of wild strawberries, and
whatever it is that lavender says to the nose—
those are the notes I would write into the song
I’m still learning to sing, this song I would tuck
into your back pocket so that you might,
in the middle of a day, perhaps, find it there,
like stars behind the blue noon sky
just waiting for their time to emerge.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grandmother, moon river, poem, poetry, song on May 20, 2018| 8 Comments »
for Merry
Though she could barely carry
a conversation, she could still sing,
so I would sit by her nursing home bed
and sing Moon River and her eyes
might not even open, but
her lips would start to move,
wider than a mile, I’m crossing
you in style someday.
Her voice was wobbly, perhaps,
but her notes were true,
and she’d smile as she sang.
Old dream maker, you
heart breaker, wherever you’re goin’,
I’m goin’ your way.
She’d been nowhere but
this bed for years,
but I could see behind her eyes
she was aiming toward some
imperceptible future,
a drifter, off to see the world
beyond this one.
And I would hold her hand
and she would squeeze it.
If she could hear the tears
in my voice, she didn’t say so.
We’d sung together since I was a girl,
show tunes in her kitchen
and hymns from the choir loft in the church.
Her soprano, a beacon of my childhood.
Now, in a room far from her,
I light a candle as she drifts away,
and sing as if she could hear me,
there’s such a lot of world to see,
my voice cloudy, as if any moment
it might start to rain and that
rainbow’s end might appear,
and for a moment, we could
look at it together before
she goes around the bend, alone.
