Singer Aretha Franklin takes a bow at the Elton John AIDS Foundation Gala at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on November 7, 2017, in New York City.
Aretha Franklin is in hospice care –
Update: Aretha Franklin Dead at 76
Next post: Let’s Review 113: Big Waves and Bad Americans
Previous post: Of the Democrats and Divorce
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
![The Death by Fire of Notre Dame in Paris (1163 - 2019) [UPDATED]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/aalileks.png "The Death by Fire of Notre Dame in Paris (1163 - 2019) [UPDATED]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
The thumbnail for your second video shows Matt Guitar Murphy. We just lost him a few weeks ago.
Never made a red centavo off’n my ass.
Nor used up more’n about 3 seconds worth of my eyeballz.
All that screamin’ and yellin’ and shit.
Make me git up an lay rubbah…..
My all time favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtBbyglq37E
God bless her. May her soul rest in peace. Growing up in the sixties/seventies, I loved her sound. It reached into my being and I felt its warmth/strength. I will pray for her soul even though I know she was a very religious woman. Prayers cannot help one to reach the eternal Paradise.
Gerard,
Thank you for this beautiful remembrance of the Queen of Soul. She passed today. I never had any idea about her excellence with the piano. My wife guessed that she learned the piano by playing for her Pastor father at his church.
When the voice and the talent matched the fame: Aretha.
That era is over.
A great clip, and leave it to Gerard VanderLeun to find something that hasn’t been played everywhere else. A thought though, in looking at the picture from 2017, she looks like she lost a lot of weight. In hearing that pancreatic cancer was what took her, that is no surprise, since pancreatic CA causes wasting (not meaning to take away anything from the greatness we remember Aretha for). Giant talent. Growing up, her voice just got people up and dancing and singing. I’m afraid Casey Klahn is right. The era of pure talent is over, or sure seems to be.
I join the Old Fart Brigade with GS on this one. I never was able to force myself to like that wailing type of black music. After they massage it and ‘make it their own’, every song sounds the same.