“First Song” by Galway Kinnell

[from Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2001), copyright © Galway Kinnell 2001, used by permission of the author and Bloodaxe Books Ltd.]

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy

After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy

Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with rosins
And the three sat the scraping of their joy.

It was now fine music the frogs and the boys

Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
 “A Repertoire” by Michael Donaghy
[from Remembering Dances Learned Last Night (Picador, 2000), copyright © Michael Donaghy 2000, used by permission of the author's estate and the publisher.]

'Play us one we've never heard before'

we'd ask this old guy in our neighborhood.
He'd rosin up a good three or four
seconds, stalling, but he always could.
This was the Bronx in 1971,
when every night the sky was pink with arson.
He ran a bar beneath the el, the Blarney Stone,
and there one Easter day he sat us down
and made us tape as much as he could play;
'I gave you these. Make sure you put that down.'
meaning all he didn't have to say.

All that summer we slept on fire escapes,

or tried to sleep, while sirens or the brass
from our neighbor’s Tito Puente tapes
kept us up and made us late for mass.
I found our back door bent back to admit
beneath the thick sweet reek of grass
a nest of needles, bottle caps, and shit.
By August Tom had sold the Blarney Stone
to Puerto Ricans, paid hid debts in cash
but left enough to fly his body home.

The bar still rises from the South Bronx ash,

its yellow neon buzzing in the noonday
dark beneath the el, a sheet-steel door
bolted where he played each second Sunday.
'Play me one I've never heard before'
I'd say, and whether he recalled those notes,
or made them up, or- since it was Tom who played-
whether it was "something in his blood"
(cancer, and he was childless and afraid,)
I couldn't tell you. And he always would.
 “Everyone Sang” by Siegfried Sassoon
[from Collected Poems 1908 - 1956 (Faber, 1961), copyright 1918, 1920 by E P Dutton, copyright © 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried
Sassoon, by permission of Barbara Levy as agent for George Sassoon and of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Recording
used by permission of the BBC.]

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.