The Day the Music Died

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.