Response to prompt #42; in the style of David Kirby
All My Black Birds
by Helen Sadler
In a spotlight on a stage in an
arena,
a
famous man sits on a stool with his guitar,
singing a song created by using the
melody
of
a Bach composition, a song about a blackbird
finding strength to fly free, a
song which has grown
more
popular over the years since the night I saw
the man sing this song during his
first American tour.
Paul
McCartney now says that the song was about
the struggle for Civil Rights he
had seen in the
United
States, but at the time the song came out
there was no mention of this, as a
matter of fact,
there
isn’t even a document with the lyrics
scratched out, as so many other
songs from that time
of
the Beatles history. Perhaps Paul just had
the lyrics come to him easily, so
easily
he
didn’t have to write it down, no broken wings to lift,
just another song from this genius
of a man
and
a musician. But others were listening,
like Charles Manson, who had found
his family of
wounded
birds and convinced them the Beatles White
Album
had hidden messages, in particular
“Blackbird,”
a
song that was telling the black man to rise up.
Charlie decided he had to show them
how it was
done,
and it was by inspiring others to go on
murderous sprees in the name of a
collection of songs.
Reading
Helter Skelter in the fall of ‘75 opened
my eyes to how art could be used
for any purpose
we
decide. But the blackbird is just one, there are more
birds that are black, like crows. I
still remember the
nightmare
I had while reading Stephen King’s The
Stand,
and the evil character of Randall
Flagg could morph
into
a crow to do his dirty work, and that
crow showed up in the night,
scaring the bejesus out
of
me so intensely I remember it now, forty
years later. To calm me down, I
turn to the Marty
Stuart
song “Observations of a Crow,” featuring
a storytelling crow on a wire
telling all the town’s
secrets.
That is a crow anyone could love, and it seems
more crow-like, after all. Crows
are black birds, but not all
blackbirds
are crows, like, say, “The Raven” Poe wrote about
so rhythmically, a raven stuck in
the eternity
of
grief, forever a shadow. But let’s get back to blackbirds,
like the “four and twenty
blackbirds baked in a pie”
as
the nursery rhyme says. Searching for this to make
sense, I found out that a 16th
century amusement
was
to put live birds in a pie so when you cut into
it they would fly away. Who thinks
of these things?
I
guess the house servants back in the day, as they wanted
to please the king, and Netflix
wasn’t available.
Those
birds deserved to be free, not baked in a pie,
which by the way, frightened me a
bit as a child.
Beaks
and feathers in a pie didn’t sound too appetizing,
let alone the spindly claw feet, and
the drawings that
went
with the rhyme in the book always showed a happy
baker, but it made
no sense to me, and still doesn’t;
but
humans are strange creatures. A huge song in the
20th century was
“Bye-Bye Blackbird,” a song which has
been
produced in many forms: Peggy Lee slow, John
Coltrane “17
minutes of greatness” fast, Ben Vereen dancing
Fosse
style. See them on YouTube! Lots of theories on
this song; is it about a prostitute
leaving
the
profession? or is it just what it sounds:
Pack up all my care and woe / Here I go,
singing low /Bye-bye, blackbird.
Why
are they singing to the blackbird? Just something
we do, I guess, like the man with
the Bach melody,
the
fireman’s son who grew up on Penny Lane,
soft in the spotlight,
melting his audience with
Blackbird singing in the dead of night/
take
these broken wings and learn to fly...
We desire to mend our brokenness, to look to our faithful
feathered
confidantes and be like them, flying free;
reaching, waiting, longing for our moment to arise.
