Contributor Series 9: If Men Had Ears
What the Poet Knew About Music
By Ray Sharp
He said the songs always came to him
like radio waves and he was just the antenna
receiving light-borne pulses across space and time
and the body electric singing them into the silent
waiting world where he lay in his room
listening for footsteps on the stairs and the knock
of fate that Beethoven sensed, half-deaf already,
and scored in stormy and heroic C minor–
Da da da dum, da da da DUM.
Ray Sharp’s most recent poem to appear here was Left Behind (May 2011).
Stay alive don’t go. He must make music for the masses.