nocturne

i like this. Not least because it's a poem about music, and not just any music, but piano music. And about what music can, and cannot, do.


Piano Solo

Years after my mother chose emptiness
at night I’d hear her at the piano
planting chords, waiting for them
to grow into something.

She never advanced from childhood
lessons. She’d crackle flat a dry page
of Bartok or Anna Magdalena
and make the house’s spine grow cold.

That was all her hesitant handfuls
conjured – misery, a lonely beginner
always beginning again, a weather
of notes I wished would pass.

They trickled onto my sheets
in the dark, each drop telling
how sad a woman could feel
even to have lost what made her sad.

(Henry Shukman, from Doctor No's Garden, Cape, 2002)
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