Wednesday, November 30, 2022

SPRECHGESANG


In my dead mother‘s purse, amid matchbooks,
roaches and cigarette butts, needles and pills,
a broken audiotape of Leonard Cohen‘s 10 New Songs. 
What she was listening to, what transported her
when the drugs no longer numbed the pain.
I fixed the tape and slipped it into the tapedeck.
His voice, a gift, having betrayed him early on
from far too many cigarettes, his song having gone 
gravelly in his prime, and yet here he was, 
talk-singing his way through a new body of work 
as he massaged his voice back into the game, 
taking me along for the ride to the end of love. 
I sent that tape off with my mother, lying so still, 
to be warmed by the bonfire, and the resurrection 
of Leonard sprechgesanging his way through 
the chorus of Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah 
all the way to the end of time.

1/30 Terri Glass Write On!

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