​ In the midst of this vast denial of life
Were the New York Jewish boy
And his Suffolk friend
Forced to tune their pieties
Beyond the darkly melancholic
Beyond the grindingly abject
And piteously horrid?
 
Face to face with the bare pathos of evil
Do you scream aloud
Or do you just play on?
Did their plinking tears
Fall like rain on the dusty soil
As violin and piano
Weave their uncertain way
Between bones
That will not wear their undraped flesh
And eyes that haunt the vista of forsaken souls
Abandoned by all the gods
On these gutted plains?
 
Do such sounds
Penetrate and restore
Or barely fold in tender arrest
The fractured heart, the withered flesh?
 
Was music here put on trial?
Were composer and executant strung tight
Blurred
Forced to confront the limits of Orpheus’ golden lyre?
 
Or did the undead
Hear in the muffled tones
The cry of one last soul
Like the brook’s murmuring babble
And return to gaze in wonder
Speechless
At the sounds that sought to mend.
 
In these camps
Menuhin the Jew
Britten the Gay
“jew, gypsy, queer and crank”
played and surely watched
fearful that a cough might
fret these lives away.
 
In the shimmering light
Amidst the scented air
Putrid with decay
Cecilia appeared
And guided their chillsome bones
Across ivory and wood
And held all their hearts intact
All – or so the legend went.
​

Gar Jones – July 2013
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