0406 The Summer Evening Music That Never Ended Poem by Michael Shepherd

It was such a warm summer evening
that the music that was promised us
after the evening meal, called to meet
the open air. I wondered, would it work,
would the delicacy of the music’s fine woven tapestry,
the shaped fine wood of instruments,
fine sounds from strings, flute, clarinet,
find themselves, or lose themselves,
on the mown front lawn before the house,
under the heavens’ curve?

Chairs, music stands, cello’s spike
were settled in the grassy earth; skirts arranged;
stillness as the group began to hear
each other’s silence and the music
not yet played; not far away; but almost here.
Something complete, it seemed,
was in the air.

Music began; acquired attitudes of listening
settled on the audience; and then, unannounced,
magic descended. Someone
who knew life so intimately, so completely,
who had passed through it even while
they lived it, was telling me in my inner ear
what life was, is, all about; in detail –
it’s like this; and this; this sweetness,
that sweetness; this sadness, that sadness;
sweetness that’s sad, sadness that is sweet;
all held like a gentle fountain - bubbling continuous,
yet gloriously and joyously, ever fresh;
to be welcomed, not to be judged or resisted,
(the hearing of it was way beyond such things)
for it held - listening to it now afresh, it holds -
all that may be known, that may be lived; this is life itself;
this, this is simply, how it is...

The sound is with me now; music told me;
this is how it is.