The last few weeks have consisted of very little beyond music in our household. Although he will deny it in the strongest way, the youngest son is frantically scrambling to get ready for the upcoming OMEA Solo/Ensemble music competition. Unfortunately, he’s been gifted with my rare ability for procrastination that can sometimes override his very natural talent. Like his father, however, most times he does manage to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat and peak at just the right time. Of course, like his father if he keeps it up he will find occasion to fall flat on his face using this methodology.

Music and reading have always been two of my most cherished releases from the mind-numbing minutiae of a career in the IT field. When you’re working with sterile, literal, and procedural computer problems you yearn for something that will make it all interesting again. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the application of logic, or that I don’t occasionally enjoy creating a particularly elegant solution to a problem, because I do. Yet throughout my entire career no problem solved has ever given me the amount of joy that one perfectly crafted phrase of word or music can.

Today’s poem melds these two worlds together with a bit of nostalgia thrown in for good measure.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to
belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

– D. H. Lawrence