How old was I when I first heard U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday?” Thirteen? Fourteen? It doesn’t matter. I was hooked!

percussion intro

followed by that iconic

arpeggio

“I can’t close my eyes

and make it go way!”

A crushing riff, and pounding drum: Bono’s sung lyrics “broken bottles and the children’s screams / bodies strewn across the dead-end street…” and “How long?…” and “we can be as one…” The song, rising in intensity, only to fall back, then surge again.

How could I, a half-Irish-descended kid embroiled in his mother’s “England, get out of Ireland!” legacy not embrace the pathos of this song?

Listening to

“Sunday, bloody Sunday”

that spinal shiver

Bono waving the white flag

amid the glowing red rocks

In comparison to my adolescent passion for a top-ten protest song, how mundane, these contents of my night table drawer. My bemusement, reminiscing over a broken watch, a colleague’s business card, a writer’s idea pocket notebook from 1994. My smirk at Ursula K Le Guin’s “Tao Te Ching” atop a hard-covered “Kama Sutra.” My gasp at my TAU pledgebook.

a broken watch

a cigar container

empty? not empty?

jigsawed memories waiting

in the dark for this moment

Nearly triple the years since I was an emerging adolescent, loving that “not a rebel song” for the first time. A middle-aged man, now: a husband and father of an eighteen-year-old son, pondering a junk drawyer. Somehow, that adolescent catches his breath at a relic of college days past. Somehow, the middle-aged man’s throat tightens, listening to “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”

eddys

from a brook passing

over rocks

how we continue

to lose and find ourselves