The right hand still had that power
to draw sadness out of the air
and bend it with a note into the half-hour
of history we came to share.
The voice was a little hoarse
and the breath much shorter –
to be expected of course
with lung cancer giving no quarter.
“See how the time is flying” struck
open the mood and we ached
with our mortal frailty
hoping together that our luck
would hold till the instrumental break
and see him a little further past eighty.
Soon we heard him leave
Berlin, the inspired song that Springsteen
covered; and how he couldn’t grieve
the father who had been
so long at war, but left again
without going anywhere except
back in his head to the jungle rain;
the Burma Star and the tin he kept
it in, the only legacy of a life
sacrificed and wasted. And soon
he was on the last night ferry, knifing
through the waves, passing the pontoon,
gazing back on the sparkling shoreline
of his life, leaning on his Epiphone Texan,
watching our faces dwindling in time
as he saw one life dim, and wrily retuned for the next one.
.
Stephen A. Linstead
Image: unknown, via Chapel Arts Centre 2018
.