Mercy of Music

Mercy of Music

(“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 1 Peter 1:3)

The flat picking swirled carelessly once it started around the room,
just like Dylan, maybe Tom Petty, with careful lyrics, and EmmyLou harmonies,
my eyes were set free; the simple tears that release the deepest angst
just below the second layer of skin. Or maybe it is like Levon Helm’s
final whispered song, sounding like the old guitar and the gutted throat,
the kind you can cry, or dance, or touch fingertips to. The kind, if you
are alone,
you let play in a loop and lullaby your way
to sleep.

I’ve been so far from the music I made, kept it square within
the boxes I found in the attic played “Gnostic Serenade” and
partly understood. Early days I danced with laughter, dropping beats
and missing sevenths all over the floor. I was young. I was an apprentice.
And you don’t start over when the people are up and dancing/

I was foolish, Jesus, to think you preferred only monastery and
diligently metered music. Older ones who played their mandolins
like guns,
never missed a line or lyric. I did nearly break a whole in the floor,
keeping time at the piano with my left boot banging below.

If I haven’t learned this by now, that music is Your sweetest gift,
so full of mercy, so fragrant like lilacs in spring. Someday I shall
breath the Asian spice deeply and understand the scales, sometimes
more than 12 tone and between the beats (maybe in 9) the scuttle of
feet on gravel is the bridge that brings all of it home.

I don’t know.

But I’ll never waste another hour or minute, tossing away a world’s good song,
because time, because boredom, because fables built fences to keep our
senses pure and unaffected
by the mercy of music misunderstood.