
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
Categories: haikai, haiku community
I enjoyed this tanka prose, Frank. I love when music (and poetry) moves the soul!
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Thanks, Colleen! 🙂
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