The long life of a protest song.
By: Hank Kalet
Greil Marcus remains for me the most important music critic going. In this essay originally delivered as the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkley he explains why Bob Dylan’s "Masters of War," perhaps his most over-the-top protest song, continues to inspire, enrage and engage its audience.
E.J. Dionne Jr. sees a bit of light in long dark argument over capital punishment.
This week’s poetry Web site is Paul Muldoon‘s, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet who will be a the Cranbury Library on Saturday.
And a poem from me:
OF MAPLES AND MOURNING
After Sept. 11
Beneath an ancient maple,
leaves fading yellow to brown as
autumn casts its cooler breezes on
the dying gasps of summer;
beneath the maple, limbs stretched
and twisting outward as if
its reach was its sole and
only power
like that last surge of light
as the filament burns to dark;
beneath an ancient maple and
staring into the open sky
the sign on the firehouse calls
for donations for the dead
and the news replays the day like
a popular song on the radio;
under a last lone maple,
roots cracking old sidewalks,
lifting blocks of concrete and
snapping the finished curbing
that lines this silent side street;
beneath this maple grown so tall the
limbs no longer stretch out between
the power lines that web the neighborhood,
as the leaves drop slow,
accumulate in erratic patterns
and the summer fades across
another page of the calendar
and we find some way to
keep ourselves going.