Tag: lost

EARLY MORNING BLUES

by

Jamie Dedes

And far into the night he crooned that tune

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed.

While the weary blues echoed through his head.

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

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Suddenly conscious, remembering, dread.

Before dawn the worst blues of the day,

those dismal black-blues of a battered heart

Gummy, gloomy blues, tangled in cobwebs

Blues – dispirited as a fatherless girl,

a widower man, a betrayed lover

Blues bereft as the loss of an old friend

Bitter-acid blues that rise in the throat of

a wage-slave, dying by slow suffocation

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Early Morning Blues . . .

The heavy-hearted blue sludge

that weighs upon the mother with her pink slip

the father with his account overdrawn

The deep, murky sea of blue that swallows up

the homeless man begging, living on the margin

Or the homeless woman sleeping on the street,

crying her cancer pain deep into the night

The sword-in-the-heart blues

of  a family living on trash-bin dinners

The dark, churning brackish blue

of a child’s empty stomach, no food in sight

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Early Morning Blues . . .

The helpless, hopeless, remorse-filled blues

that come as Time runs out and Eternity beckons

That darkest of hues with shivering slivers

of pewter blue, muting to grey, muting to black

Muting to light fractures in a surface

permeable and permissible, heavenly light

Or so “they” tell me . . .

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But lost in a sea of light

will “I’ still be?

will “you” still be?

Answer me that.

What is the character of this light?

Matter or myth?

Ah, then, after all, pondering further

I find I really don’t care

I’ll poem the blues and poem my light

until all that’s left of me is what

I’ve left behind . . .

and you?

Will you leave your unwritten

blue poem hanging in the air to be

heard by those few who can?

Or, will you, like Africans of old, paint

yourself blue and boiling tears

dance around the fire and give

birth to the soul of a new art

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Photo credit ~ Wilfredo R. Rodriguez H. via Wikipedia