You know you’re getting close to borrowed years
When obituaries reflect your own
Contemporaries and peers
Who no one will ever clone
My abrupt admission to this class
Apart from Buddy Holly’s crash
Was John Lennon’s tumultuous death
Hard to bear for those with sixties breath
We still admire the yesterday and Wings of Paul
But imagine the influence that left with John’s fall
I was nowhere to be seen when bardic poets took flight
Dylan Thomas did not go gentle into his good night
Under the table not under milkwood
Drink not guns in the same apple where John stood
He saw his fateful end and afterlife in our native Wales
Death shall have no dominion he rails
The harbinger of cultural iconic demise
Vengefully returned these last few years
Some young, some old, often no surprise
Yet sane women cry, even men shed tears
One year ago, David Bowie played out his last androgynous lives
Prince would be no more color purple rain
George Michael couldn’t be woken before he went, went
As Leonard Cohen breathed their last hallelujahs
In early seventeen, two black men departed this earth
Poet and singer; these words don’t suffice
To finesse the impact of their birth
On generations of thirsty souls on ice
I refer, of course, in case you forgot
To incomparable Berry and Walcott
Nobels and Fame Halls mean a lot
But effects on you and I are what
They take to their graveyard plot
Chuck Berry, father of rock and roll, lived to his nineties
Taught by Muddy Waters, he had to be good
Influencing us teenagers in the late fifties
Rolled over Beethoven and Johnny B Goode
Even showed his ding-a-ling to the president in the Whitehouse
Derek Walcott embraced, as many of us do
The riddle of our identity
Ancestors yielded him to St Lucia
Balancing post-colonialism with his British and African friends
Using a poet’s instinct
To explain the inexplicable
And describe the indescribable
No wonder he wrote ‘The divided child’
No doubt he contemplated his own long future
‘You are suddenly old, white hair, like the heron
When things sunder themselves to the
Emptiness of a bright silence after thunder’
Bring him back home was that thunder
As Hugh Masekela, Bra Hugh, lauded Mandela
Urged by Huddlestone, gifted by Armstrong
Pushed by Gillespie and Coltrane, in exile
Performing with Ibrahim and Bellefonte
Fighting alcohol, drugs and wives many
He did come home, after grazing in the grass
Africa’s father of jazz
Some call themselves Lady or Prince
Others arrive with the name of King
But the whole world had the sense
To let Arethra sing and claim the ring
Of the Queen of Soul
The diva and master
Daughter of a preacher man
From the choir, taught the pastor
What the commandment of respect can
Do o’er the divide of color and soul
You make me feel, an iconic
Urge for natural African-American women
Sisters for themselves in Eurythmics
Spirit in the dark, when
Black America needed her Soul
The rock face that separates the
Alluvial plane of ordinariness
From the peaks of achievement is sheer
And those peaks once ascended are joined by crevasses
Designed, like the octopus tentacles
To drag the achievers down
The pitfalls may be of arrogance, hedonism or hubris
Some never return and descend to tragedy
As Presley and Jackson showed us
Yet those who survived the climb to the heavenly peak
Must eventually descend to the grave God designed for them
Let us rejoice with
The passing of these great masters
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, March 2017, revised September 2018
