Dawn coming in over the fields <br />of darkness takes me by surprise <br />and I look up from my solitary road <br />pleased not to be alone, the birds <br />now choiring from the orange groves <br />huddling to the low hills. But sorry <br />that this night has ended, a night <br />in which you spoke of how little love <br />we seemed to have known and all of it <br />going from one of us to the other. <br />You could tell the words took me <br />by surprise, as they often will, and you <br />grew shy and held me away for a while, <br />your eyes enormous in the darkness, <br />almost as large as your hunger <br />to see and be seen over and over. <br /> <br />30 years ago I heard a woman sing <br />of the motherless child sometimes <br />she felt like. In a white dress <br />this black woman with a gardenia <br />in her hair leaned on the piano <br />and stared out into the breathing darkness <br />of unknown men and women needing <br />her songs. There were those among <br />us who cried, those who rejoiced <br />that she was back before us for a time, <br />a time not to be much longer, for <br />the voice was going and the habits <br />slowly becoming all there was of her. <br /> <br />And I believe that night she cared <br />for the purity of the songs and not <br />much else. Oh, she still saw <br />the slow gathering of that red dusk <br />that hovered over her cities, and no <br />doubt dawns like this one caught <br />her on the roads from job to job, <br />but the words she'd lived by were <br />drained of mystery as this sky <br />is now, and there was no more "Easy <br />Living" and she was "Miss Brown" to <br />no one and no one was her "Lover Man." <br />The only songs that mattered were wordless <br />like those rising in confusion from <br />the trees or wind-songs that waken <br />the grass that slept a century, that <br />waken me to how far we've come.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/songs-5/
