These stay-at-home days offer lagoons of time to hang out together and to reflect. Music has been a big part of many people’s home-based, pandemic days.
Grooves connect us. The classical radio station, for some, may soothe. Listening to the radio can enlarge. For me, many mornings begin again with jazz favorites, like Cookin’ by Miles Davis, Whisper Not by Keith Jarrett, and of course, Coltrane’s Love Supreme, which opens with a trumpet waking up.
What music means: Imagine a flower with a million petals. Each petal is someone’s taste, boogie-down, dreamy escape, vibe.
In 2018— was it really three years ago! — rock singer Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries died from unknown causes. She’d not been well, it appears. For me, she was an iconic and brave singer, fierce with honesty.
Simultaneous Revolutions is a forthcoming poetry pamphlet from PM Press, by myself and Marcus Colasurdo, set for 2021. This sequence dances with music as a recurrent subject and theme. It has a poem dedicated to Dolores O’Riordan, which celebrates her music and its power. I share:
ODE TO DOLORES
Can a woman loosen what’s hoped
so our hearts jam out in the open?
Can she sing past what’s spoken
in the humdrum until
it’s unbroken
so our best intent’s
again in motion
like Dolores O’Riordan
of The Cranberries,
and how she shared
her emotions, a pugnacious Aphrodite
from some island hamlet
onto the world stage
until fate reclaimed its minute.
Yes, an emerald dazzler
who strutted and solo’d
to where conscience dares
and took us with her
so our pulses merged
into mirrors and made
a second family.
G. H. Mosson and Marcus Colasurdo are the authors of Heart X-rays (PM Press 2018) and of several books in their individual names. Their next collaboration of lyric poems is forthcoming from PM Press in 2021, Simultaneous Revolutions. For more, click here.