The Blackbird Song

When Cheyne and I were married, we had our dear friend Jory play the old Beatles tune The Blackbird Song at our wedding, in honor of Cheyne's father, who passed away while he was growing up. We played it at the children's blessingways and naming ceremnies, and now it is in remembrance of many other loved ones who have passed: my Grandmother Aley, my cousin John, my Aunt Mary, and , of course, Cheyne's lovely and one of a kind mother, Sheryl. Songs about ravens and blackbirds and mockingbirds fill my playlist lately. A family Cheyne grew up with lost their twenty four year old son to suicide. They were and are a lovely family, full of life and love. truly devoted and kind people. When we were expecting Sol, Cheryl, the boys mother, pulled Cheyne aside and told him that people would bombard us with advice, but in the end we would need to trust our own instincts, follow our own hearts, find our own way. She told me something similar at my baby shower, that all advice was neither here nor there BUT if she were to give ANY, it would be that stroking a baby's forehead between his eyebrows would lead him to close his eyes.

I feel rocked to my core that the boy she first practiced this on is gone, ripped from her by pain and a horrible rush to action. Cheyne's first response was, " I wish I could tell him it inevitably gets much better than twenty four." We both can remember some pretty wretched feelings in our twenties, and our hearts break for how lost this poor young man must have felt.

I am listening to Coltrane play the Blackbird Song. And I am trying to find my bearings for so much grief. Such loss.

I though I would share this lovely poem by Ronald Stuart Thomas:

A Blackbird Singing

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears

Ronald Stuart Thomas