On Day 634 of the daily poems our poet Fiona Clark pens her tribute to Paul McCartney and JS Bach, with a heartfelt cry for the assaulted and assailed.
McCartney’s Blackbird
Though darkness settles
on the dense earth,
lit by flares from Gaza,
torn by children’s cries,
a bright-edged moon
sheds silver light
and wakens a blackbird,
singing in the dead of night.
A blackbird’s trill,
a riff on Bach’s Bourée
in E minor, reharmonised
and rippling through the song
Black girl weeping at Little Rock
in the blaze of day,
takes her broken wings
and learns to fly.
A woman on a rocky shore
listens to the bird’s clear notes,
sunlight from that yellow bill,
hope springing from the
finger-pick-and-strum
of strings, the mellow thrum
of music from a golden throat.
She was only waiting
for this moment to arise.
Fiona Clark