S.I.P. Gil Scot Heron

I have been in the New York area for the last two weeks, working in the City the first week and visiting with my parents and friends in NJ for the last few days, before returning to Spain tomorrow.

Ever since I left the US for Spain some 26 years ago, such returns tug my mind and memory in many different directions. "You can't go home again" goes the old truism. It may be right, but whatever truth it encloses seems to wrong us in our perpetually earnest efforts to travel back across cultures, continents, ages and periods of our lives, to reconnect and mend frayed threads.

Many memories welled up today on hearing the sad news that singer, songwriter, musician and poet Gil Scot Heron has passed on, finishing his sojourn here all too soon at just 62, before moving on to the definitive home where we are all summoned  to return. Swing in peace, Gil.

I am embedding below a clip of his classic "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". It still packs a wallop after all these years...

An alternate reading of the poem by Gil Scot Heron can be heard here.

Anyone care to reprise this for the revolution will not be podcast?

Four Haiku Movements of a Near Summer Day

           I

the sunlight nestles
on the maple’s brow and lays
golden trembling eggs

           II
the melon’s crisp red
crunches the noonday silence
until the breeze blows

          III
the green choirs of rye
dance glissandos in the wind
humming their sun strobed songs

          IV
fog erases my home
smears its glow onto the night
muffling my footsteps



Shoreham Lavender — © Derek Hansen
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