"It's a perfect time for anything to happen" Bob Dylan
A world without poetry never emerges from the gray. Henry Timrod's poems, long lost among scholars who study the world that was the antebellum South, now sell off the shelves, thanks to Bob Dylan's latest album, "Modern Times".
Dylan's album is a masterpiece without parellel in a career full of them. Listenging to many voices, old and young, from opera to country, I don't know if I have ever heard a more beautiful and convincing voice than Dylan's when he sings "Working Man Blues #2". It is the crowning achievement of an amazing career. His references to Timrod are fascinating, as well as his crooning, taken from one of Bing Crosby's earliest recordings.
"Nettie Moore" is a stunningly painful song, taken from a song written around 1860 by a man who had fallen in love with a young slave girl, only to painfully watch her sold off; he lelf helpless and broken, with only memories of lost happier days to cling to.
someone once said that a life unworthy of analysis is a life unworthy of living. How this short, dark poem written years ago, causes me to reflect! did I ever thank my own father for his thankless works?
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.
When rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's auster and lonely offices?
