Thursday, December 3, 2009

Blossom in the Dust


I promised myself I'd write once a month, and here it is, only 3 days late. Not like my new CD, which is, something like 2 years late. That's the blessing and the curse of the home studio.

Songs are like children. Early on, they must be nurtured. If neglected they eventually drift off like homeless waifs into the whorls of stars.

Odd that the saddest events in our lives can produce the most inspired songs. And what we hear out of the corners of our ears can become lines in those songs, and so I thought I heard my friend, Suz, say at the kitchen table one afternoon the phrase, "Blossom in the Dust." But she didn't say it. The song did get written, though. It was for my uncle, a wonderful man, a psychiatrist, naturopath and healer who decided inexplicably to end his life.

Around the same time I was contacted by a fan who lives in Belgium. He was grief-stricken. His son, Remy, had been killed by an automobile, did I want to write a song for him? As I listened to the grief of this man, while slung up in my own grief, I realized that this is a song for everyone who has had a loved one plucked too early from their heart.
http://jean-luc1952.skyrock.com/

It's been two years now that I've been trying to keep this child of a song alive, from floating off into the ethers. As the year comes to a close, I think I may too have finally finished it.

Ah, the moon
Is scarred with silver
And its face
Too far to touch
So pale
In the branches
Like a blossom
In the dust

Ah they told you
Life would hurt you
But they didn’t
Say how much
Cast your pearls
Back in the ocean
Cast your blossoms
In the dust

Take this flower
From your heart
Your tears have turned it
White with rust
Let the wind
Strip the petals
Scatter blossoms
In the dust

Love until
You are empty
Love until
You love too much
Love until
Love undoes you
Makes you blossom
In the dust