TOO LATE FOR ROSES

by Gifford Savage

If Sinéad was here she would call out the fakery, 
false flattery, fickle bleeding-heart eulogies.
See straight through the fawning hypocrisy.
Where were we all when she needed us to stand 
with her, for her, beside her?
When Sinatra and the old guard condemned her,
and the self-styled Madonna spurned her?
What did you say when Dylan fans booed her in ’92, 

did you speak out then?
Dylan fans, though, have a history 
of resisting the winds of change.
Perhaps the hopes and dreams of a generation
died along with JFK—
or were buried at the Lorraine Hotel
in Memphis Tennessee?
Maybe this slight figure with the voice of an angel
was an unwelcome reminder,
that they’d sold out to ‘The Man’ in the end?
But those Dylan fans are no different from all the rest.
A crowd, of course, is untameable, unpredictable.
Hailing heroes one moment,
only to crucify them the next
then declare their undying love for the dead.
She would have hated the herd mentality,
for she walked the narrow road
through stones that never broke her bones,
but surely pierced her hurting heart.
So we assuage our guilt or jump the bandwagon
with our social-media posts of googled facts,
our YouTube shares
our limpid lamentations.
We didn’t deserve her—any of us.
But we mourn and miss her
this fragile lioness of truth.
Too late now to tell her she is loved,
to leave futile bouquets of flowers.
She can no longer hear us.
But we need more than ever, to listen to her.

Gifford Savage is from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His poetry has appeared in a number of journals including The Storms, The Bangor Literary Journal, Agape Review, and previously in The New Verse News. He won the Aspects Festival Poetry Slam 2022.

HOMAGE TO WAYNE (AND MY FATHER)

by Dick Altman

In a 2014 interview, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was asked how often his working quartet rehearsed. His reply was evasive and illuminating: “How do you rehearse the future?” This was classic Shorter—gnomic, gnostic, mischievous, wise. It was a bit of a humblebrag too. For more than six decades, he conjured the future of music into being, with or without the benefit of rehearsal. Shorter, who died yesterday at 89, was a giant of jazz as an improviser, bandleader, and thinker, but above all as a composer—arguably the greatest in jazz since Thelonious Monk, and inarguably one of the greatest the genre, and the United States, has ever produced. —David A. Graham, The Atlantic, March 3, 2023

                               “All or nothing at all

                                 Half a love, never appealed to me

                                 If your heart, it never could yield to me

                                Then I'd rather, rather have nothing at all…”

 

Wayne—I once thought Sinatra’s voice was the best one alive

to interpret the ballad that launched his career into the musical

stratosphere—until I heard yours—heard your sax—above

a hundred-and-fifty other memorable voices—wrap its breath

around my soul—your intimate—languid purr—as if stroking—

rather than playing—the notes—imbues “longing” with the blade

of desire unshared—I imagine us conversing at The Five Spot—

Greenwich Village’s storied jazz dive—your “All or Nothing at All”

doing all the talking—softly—soothingly—trying to mend

a twentyish broken heart—you keep it low and slow—no evidence

of Sinatra’s signature swing—you’re standing at the other side

of the table—answering the sadness you see in my eyes—my face—

so very you to sing as if I were the only person in the room—

 

                                 I said all, or nothing at all

                                 If it's love, there ain't no in between

                                 Why begin then cry, for something

                                 that might have been

                                 No I'd rather, rather have nothing at all

 

Your sax bewitchingly mouths the words—shares their ache—

this is your magic—to get beneath the skin of the music—to find

the pulse—to release its essence—I close my eyes—draw into me

the air filled with your genius—wonder if there will ever be another

like you—like her

 

Note: The poet’s father Arthur Altman composed the music to “All or Nothing at All.” Lyrics used in the poem by permission.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.