I've decided to do something a little different today. I love music, but I also love poetry. So here is a poem about music that I've been working on about something that means a lot to me.
The Day We Howled and Gold was Gone
I
was late for work because there was a documentary on the oldies
station about the day the music died, and because I was crying.
Because it wasn't just a plane
crash. It was one of the most symbolically pivotal moments in
America's history. It was the quintessential "power of a moment"
moment.
Three
kids, just trying to make a living amid the idealism of the 1950's.
When
the newspapers were the real news
when
the women wore aprons all day and loved to bake cakes and never
aspired to be greater than what everyone expected them to be
when
children were rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed and walking to school arm in
arm
when
sex was censored on television and every married room had two twin
beds with matching floral prints
when
the magazines were filled with smiling people in ads and smiling
celebrities and smiling men drinking aged Scotch
when
lovers met in grade school and got married right out of high school
when
we listened to soft jazz and even the Everly Brothers
when
we danced with each other in felt skirts and saddle shoes in
gymnasiums
when
the sunrise was golden every morning, and the nights were never dark
enough for anything bad to happen
when
everything was closed on Sundays except for the churches, and so we
rested
when
the mind was an innocent thing and we never had to worry.
And
then these three kids were playing a show,
something
a little edgy,
and
they needed to do some laundry
and
they were bantering how boys banter and laughing and singing
and
everything was golden, except for the snow.
The
snow was so white and so fierce that the pilot couldn't see,
and
they weren't flying but a few minutes when they crashed--
their
bodies tossed carelessly into the snow.
Their
wives cried and their babies died and their lovers wept and their
mothers fainted and America looked up into the sky and wondered at
the lack of gold in the morning
and
then we heard the news.
And
we wept with the lovers.
The
music of innocence that had so epitomized America had crashed with
that plane.
The
music became, not gradually, but suddenly, something strong and
fighting and passionate and sexual and searching hard for something
in the night.
Suddenly,
it wasn't the first half of the twentieth century, it was the second
half, and the days of aprons and separate beds were gone.
America
experienced a shift, unknowingly.
We
unfolded our hands from their quiet place in our laps and we put them
on each other's naked bodies and on bottles of cheap booze and into
the air like fists, protesting for our freedom.
Our
freedom to be equal, our freedom to love, our freedom to have peace;
our freedom to rebel.
The
day the music died, we found a new music inside of ourselves, and it
was the same fierce, passionate music that the storm was playing the
night they crashed.
And
I have to cry, because we lost our innocence.
And
then we lost our passion.
We've
rebelled against everything we can think to rebel against, and we've
stood up for every cause we've stumbled across, and so now we sing
pop songs and don't know how to dance and sell our souls to the
internet, yelling in the streets that we only live once.
The
day the music died, we mourned. We grieved. We sobbed as a nation,
together, united under God and under loss. We felt, because music had
taught us how.
It
had taught us how to cry when we felt ourselves losing our childhood
carelessness.
It
taught us how to yell into the sky in the rain when we hated God for
putting us in this cold, careless, shattered universe.
It
taught us how to laugh with our hearts, our backs against outdated
carped, humored by the ironies of this life.
It
taught us how to leak love by the buckets, to give even the shirts on
our backs and not expect recompense, to dance in the streets by
lamplight, and to sit on our front porches and just.be.still.
And
then the music died, and here we are left with autotuned bullshit
that teaches us about greed and rape and murder and conformity and
complacency and exclusion and an unstoppable fast pace that mocks the
truly wise.
The
piano keys, both the black and the white, are streaked with blood;
the artists are dragged from their instruments like criminals.
And
it's no wonder that all the girls who sing the blues are going to
smile and walk away.
