The Songs Go On And My Soul Goes On With Them Poem by Shalom Freedman

SONG is really the original form of poetry: the poet and his lyre, his voice singing his own words - its the Orpheus tradition. This is a song/poem of gratitude, and the gratitude is deeply connected to your experience of poetry. You describe the poems as ahead of you with your soul following after, just as the poet's voice is projected ahead of him and he follows after. Soul, Self, Song make up a trinity of imagination and that gives you the moral strength to celebrate life even as time diminishes it bit by bit. The longest line had to be long because it holds in the poem's structure what has held your life together - BEAUTY and LOVE. These two blessings must appear in tandem. They can't be separated on different lines. Their equality is the essence of your hope.