Beginning Again
Posted on | December 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
In the past year my wife Sylvia has pulled back from her big
artistic projects and gone back to the piano, which took a back seat to her other pursuits in music and the arts for many decades. We recently found a picture of her at age seventeen standing next to her family’s piano in a dress she had made. Moreover, the picture contained the same book (John Thompson’s “Modern Course for the Piano”) that she has returned to now under the guidance of a teacher in our community. All of this led to a poem that might resonate for all of you who have taken up something that meant much in younger years and that can once again feed you in a new way. As they say in the fancy restaurants, “enjoy.”
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Her fingertips caress the keys
exploring half-remembered chords,
hands travel over black and white
reflections of her hair,
eyes pry harmonies from clustered dots
within red covers of a lesson book.
On the shelf a picture of a girl,
calm resolution in her face,
upright piano ready for her touch,
red music book set smartly on its rack,
watching as herself
begins again.
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2 Responses to “Beginning Again”
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William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. READ MORE...
Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.
December 6th, 2011 @ 7:09 pm
Bill:
Glad to see you getting back into your poetry
blogs. I look forward to them.
My sister Sylvia never ceases to amaze me. She’s never too busy, tired or whatever to start some major new endeavor and I have no doubts that she will conquer the piano as she has everything else she became interested in.
!!GO SYLVIA!!!
December 7th, 2011 @ 10:30 am
Yes, those Johnson girls… GO! One other correspondent reports that she also took up John Thompson’s book on returning recently to the piano. A life passage for sure.
I have added my recording of the poem to the post.