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Column 420

Playing to the River

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.07.2013

There’s some­thing won­der­ful about hap­pen­ing upon a musi­cian play­ing for his or her own plea­sure, com­plete­ly absorbed in the music. Jeff Daniel Mar­i­on is a fine poet from east Ten­nessee. And here’s a woman play­ing the bagpipes.

Playing to the River

She stands by the riverbank, 
notes from her bagpipes lapping
across to us as we wait

for the traffic light to change.
She does not know we hear—
she is playing to the river,

a song for the water, the flow
of an unknown melody to the rocky
bluffs beyond, for the mist

that was this morning, shroud
of past lives: fishermen
and riverboat gamblers, tugboat captains

and log raftsmen, pioneer and native
slipping through the eddies of time.
She plays for them all, both dirge

and surging hymn, for what has passed
and is passing as we slip
into the currents of traffic,
the changed light bearing us away.
 

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Poem copyright ©2012 by Jeff Daniel Marion, whose most recent book of poems is Father, Wind Publications, 2009. First appeared in Still: The Journal, an online publication, Winter 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Jeff Daniel Marion.  
Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.

Column 421