TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY

by John Linstrom

George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as Autumn and December, died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. —The Washington Post, June 9, 2023

Today I heard you’d died.
It’s been a strange day.
Wildfire smoke swept from Quebec
down the Atlantic seaboard

and darkened the air of Manhattan
where years ago I saw you play
a benefit concert with my wife
who I was only dating then—

a moon hung above the stage
where you sat and your fingers
stretched over the cold keys
pulling forth arpeggiated chords

from my memory. Your album
December the only thing my mother
could listen to when giving birth.
Today I wonder what labor falls

upon the lands of Canada, the airs

of home, while frightful golden plains
bridge the continent as thick fallen sky,
the smell filtered through spectral masks we

kept too ready, and George, I want to know
what we will do without you, without
your hands and heart, what the land will be

without passing through the mystery of your mind.

John Linstrom’s first book of poetry, To Leave for Our Own Country, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. Linstrom is a writer, a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in New York City, and the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northwest Review, Writers Resist, North American Review, The Christian Century, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.

UKRAINE: NOTES, 2014

by Kathleen Sousa Capps

@anadoluimages: A piano painted the colours of Ukrainian national flag at Independence Square in the capital Kiev.
Image source: Veooz 360

If I knew how to play
I’d set up a grand piano
In Kiev
In Independence
Square
Right now
While it’s winter
Though each note hang on the air
Like an icicle suspended
From the frame of a burnt out bus
It would still be carried with passion
Wrung from the heart of a nightingale
I’d play every Handel and Mozart Requiem,
Every song that blows out a candle
Every thought that says THIS IS NOT A COUP
This is a cry for human rights, to let us out of this
Dictatorship, this collaboration with fascism
To deny freedom of choice, to deny free trade,
Intellect, spirit, Ukraine and Europe.
Right now
While Kiev is burning
In flames
And riot police claim lives
And protestors toss Molotov cocktails
If I could I’d sit in front of a grand piano
And each moment would pray for peace


Kathleen Sousa Capps holds a PhD in English from University of Oregon (1998).  Publications in literary and academic journals, including Paideuma.   Dissertation topic: Image Trouble: Pound’s People-Making as Visual Discourse.  Trying to find an agent/publisher for her novel, Blackberry Woman.  Because Kathleen is hearing impaired and blind, her father forbade her to learn to play the piano; he said it was a waste of time.  And college is no place for women.  (That’s what he said.)

REVIEW: FALL CONCERT 2010

by Robert Farmer

 

To the piano in his own sweet way
on the arm of the conductor,
while the packed-house crowd stood,
sang Happy Birthday through tears.
On his ninetieth, not just another gig.

He pulled us back to festivals
and the 50’s college stands,
our youth now gray throughout,
old ladies in dress circle
dancing again to Take Five.

His chops still simple, straight, lyrical,
no pyrotechnical improvisation.
Our age ordered silence on the solos
as we grazed back through lives
to sounds once lost,
now avengefully heralded
by today’s Downbeat recognition.

The Cleveland Symphony played backup,
then stood and cheered.

 
Robert Farmer is a retired professor of forest ecology who lives in Cleveland. He occasionally publishes poems in various journals, including New Verse News.