Tag Archives: poem about music

“Make Your Own Kind of Music” For NaPoWriMo 2024, Day 17

This is actually a true story. When I was at the beach a few years ago, I had a house right on the beach and it got so I never knew who I would find on my porch when I woke up in the morning. In the end, they set a number of my poems to music and recorded them.

Make Your Own Kind of Music

One and  two and three and four.
Four little music makers pounding on my door.
One beats a rhythm, one toots a horn––
wild and sweet––sort of forlorn.
One hums a tune behind his teeth––
a sort of descant underneath
the melody on the steel guitar.
The gulls reel in from near and far
to add their screams to the refrain,
then fan their wings, silent again.

Four musicians at my gate.
I wait for their music to abate.
Then I go and let them in
to add my music to the din.
I sing my lyrics fast and slow
first soft then loud, my lyrics go
up and over the drums and horn–
out into the sandy morn.
Over the rocks and out to sea,
setting all our music free.

When the drummer leaves my porch,
he leaves just three to loft the torch.
Too soon the horn, too, fades away
but the hummer’s here to stay,
and the steel guitar swells out to fill
the morning air until until
the morning fades into full sun
and our melody comes done.

Soon guitar and singer fade,
their morning share of music made,
and I fold my songs away.
I’ll bring them out some other day.
With music left behind I wind
only words around my mind.
They weave their spell with me along.
I lose myself in their noisy throng.
Wander aimless, round and round,
in getting lost, this poem is found.

For NaPoWriMo 2024, day 17.
Thanks, Mama Cass, for making your own kind of music!! Go here to hear her:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mraLsg-G4wA

Lifesong

Click on photos to enlarge.

Lifesong

When twilight fast approaches and the evening bells have rung,
a time comes when the dirges and funeral songs are sung.
A barrage of nasty people, crepuscular and stark,
stream out of their burrows to frolic in the dark.

So must the locals given to activities of light
draw into their houses in shelter from the night,
and play their music louder to drown the dirges out,
and quell the morbid moaning with a joyous shout.

It’s in such rebellion that happiness is hung.
It’s not enough to live it, joy also must be sung.
Shout life to the rafters and live it to the hilt.
It’s your choice on which foundation your life story is built.

Prompt words today are people, nasty, crepuscular, barrage and rung.

Music of the Spheres

Music of the Spheres
“What tears us apart can bring us together.”

Music dips a candle and lights it at the wick,
spilling notes like light out, full and round and thick.
It builds a room around us, brick by brick by brick,
shedding shards of ditties sharp enough to nick
our inflated sensibilities, popping those balloons
of our inflated selves to turn us from buffoons
into sentient beings, open to romance,
and filling out our lives with more than circumstance.

Anger, joy, nostalgia, need or fear or wonder
can unite us in experience or tear our world asunder.

All these warring sentiments are meant to coincide
in human hearts where all of them are destined to abide.
Music is the language that gives us each a tether
that unites individuals and ties us all together,

Prompt word today are music, note, crumbs, coincide and brick.

Found Poem

 

 

I was looking for another poem that I wrote but have never published or put on my blog. I couldn’t find it but instead found this poem that I wrote four years ago. Seems as though it would qualify for this prompt!!  It’s actually a true story. When I was at the beach a few years ago, I had a house right on the beach and it got so I never knew who I would find on my porch when I woke up in the morning. 

Found Poem

One and  two and three and four.
Four little music makers pounding on my door.
One beats a rhythm, one toots a horn––
wild and sweet––sort of forlorn.
One hums a tune behind his teeth––
a sort of descant underneath
the melody on the steel guitar.
The gulls reel in from near and far
to add their screams to the refrain,
then fan their wings, silent again.

Four musicians at my gate.
I wait for their music to abate.
Then I go and let them in
to add my music to the din.
I sing my lyrics fast and slow
first soft then loud, my lyrics go
up and over the drums and horn–
out into the sandy morn.
Over the rocks and out to sea,
setting all our music free.

When the drummer leaves my porch,
he leaves just three to loft the torch.
Too soon the horn, too, fades away
but the hummer’s here to stay,
and the steel guitar swells out to fill
the morning air until until
the morning fades into full sun
and our melody comes done.

Soon guitar and singer fade,
their morning share of music made,
and I fold my songs away.
I’ll bring them out some other day.
With music left behind I wind
only words around my mind.
They weave their spell with me along.
I lose myself in their noisy throng.
Wander aimless, round and round,
in getting lost, this poem is found.

 

For Fandango’s Dog Days of August Challenge: Something you Found.

NaPoWriMo Day 15: Jazz Riff

 

 

For NaPoWriMo, they want us to write a poem that copies the style of a favorite song or type of music. I chose Jazz.music

Change of Tune

Change of Tune

A new aesthetic each few years from dead head to new waving.
It seemed a change of music was to be his signature craving.
Disco led to hip hop, new age to heavy metal.
When moving to new rhythms, he felt in finest fettle.
Some found his music vile and others found it strange,
but at least within a year or two, it was bound to change.
The prestige of being “with it” was probably the reason
he changed his favorite style of music every other season.

 

Prompts today are aesthetics, strange, vile, prestige and wave.

Inscribing an Epitaph for the King of Music

Inscribing an Epitaph for the King of Music

When it came to lyrics, his wit was finely tined. 
His words were sharp and pointed. He had a rapier mind.
When he was at his zenith, his music was sublime.
Perfect in its sentiment, exquisite in its rhyme.
His tunes were like a river moving words along.
All the world’s fine miracles occurred in every song.
Each run an apparition that faded out of sight
just as the next melodic ghost appeared to take its bite.

His music effervescent, then thundering, then gory,
devoured all our senses, flooding us with its glory.
He raced us through emotion as though running out of time.
Each opus was a mountain, exhausting in the climb.
Then when we reached its zenith, he released us from its hold
with one brief caesura that freed us from the fold
to barrel down the mountain in one euphoric sweep—
sliding from the summit down to the deepest deep.

They scribed a single word in stone over his burial mound
to describe this musician who married words and sound 
to take us all on journeys magical and euphoric,
and yet the label “Maestro,” just seems too categoric
to conjure up this genius who could transport us all
to every corner of ourselves within that massive hall.
He deserves a finer word. A more distinctive label,
but words fail me as I choose what I’d inscribe if I were able.

Prompt words today are tune, occur, apparition and zenith. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/rdp-sunday-tune/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/03/10/fowc-with-fandango-occur/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/your-daily-word-prompt-apparition-march-10-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/zenith-2/

Loud Music in the Rainy Season

 

Click on any photo to enlarge all.


Loud Music in the Rainy Season

Up above me, such a din!
I feel my patience growing thin.
Cross fingers that they do not fall
as workmen scamper over all,
balancing on domes and peaks,
replacing roof tiles, sealing leaks.

They’re taking the old surface off
all my domes and drainage trough,
putting membrane down and goo
that will not let the water through
in June when rains beat hard and steady,
although, alas, they’ve come already!

The dogs are sent into a tizzy.
Looking up, I just get dizzy.
In this world that I love so,
down here in lovely Mexico,
now the grinder joins the din.
In a noise Olympics, it would win!

My thoughts all center on escaping
this chipping, drilling, pounding, scraping.
How I’d like to leave this all
for relative quiet at the mall!
But, alas, I must remain
a martyr to construction pain.

Ear plugs having no effect,
before my sanity is wrecked,
I turn up music to a SHOUT
to let Bob Dylan drown them out.
Now Caitlin Cary croons and sings
that she is “Sorry” and other things.

Eliza Gilkyson’s rough croon
is over oh too soon, too soon.
The silence that her true love speaks
replaced now by the sander’s shrieks,
I turn the iPod on again,
full force, to drown out all the din.

I’ve no sympathy for the neighbors’ plight.
Their damn dog kept me up all night,
and if my eardrums are to be shot
I would rather that it’s not
by machines like those above,
but rather by a sound I love.

The prompt word today is “thin.”

Banded

Click on any photo to enlarge all.


Banded

From string to string and fret to fret,
they draw us into music’s net.
They strum and pick and blithely finger
notes that make us want to linger,
tap the table, move our feet
to their infectious strumming beat.

They are my favorite sort of band––
unique and playing their own brand
of acoustic, bluesy notes––
a kind of music that denotes
connection to a world of hearts.
Their music woos and cuts and smarts.

Opening sensibilities.
Music that unites and frees
our spirits to commune and soar.
Notes that journey to our core.
Which is what music’s meant to do
in  dancehall, city street or pew.

Good music sets our hats askew,
chases us down and counts a coup.
Stirs our hearts and brings a change.
Astounds us with its depth and range.
Draws us with it, layer on layer,
unites us in communal prayer.

Denominationless, it draws
us in and gives a place to pause
together to survey that place
devoid of sex or age or race.
That place where we unite in song.
Give up ourselves, and sing along.

The prompt today is fret.

I Keep Your Promise

I Keep Your Promise

Rain beats a riff on the back window
as I drive away from your familiar
promises, like lyrics of a worn-out song.
“Never again,” is made true this time,
my choice instead of your vow.

It’s only truth I take away with me:
torn buttons, bruises, broken dreams.
The empty baby carriage
you’ll find in the spare room,
one more unused space
in a house too rarely
a home.

I was the house
you entered
but never
spread out in—
the rumpus room
battered with misuse—
a refrigerator
filled with carry-out and cartons
with their “use by” dates all lapsed.

I was the melody
to that false chord
you loved to strike,
proud in your outlaw status—
that anchor that held your music to the page.

I see its strains floating after me,
as though that part of you
knows what it will miss
and even now
is trying to be found.

 

The prompt word today is riff.