for Charlie Haden
Oh, Lord, we’d listen. We’d listen to restraint, hand clasped with taut hand, without complaint, to the silence, to above all, the voice calling through the response, of off chords and a plucked bass line we’d feel in our fingernails, the sway of our knees and the tug at the nape of our neck. Oh, Lord, these refrains, a sung soundtrack through the violence of those years.
Where you started a note, we’d pick up, a language of stung words, of pauses, and we knew the meaning. We’d been weaned on late night gatherings, and, later we’d share radio, TV, the livestream that picked up the steam of a spare melody.
And, when we listened, it was the call of sorrow, of scapegoats, the call of a dream we’d dare not have, the dream of a liberation, of a congregation, a nation formed, under you, a nation of silence between notes.