DON’T STOP
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
It’s about a dark night, a path, thick woods.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
The cabin you found had a hard dirt floor,
cobwebs, an old guitar made of plywood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Sometimes the pictures change, sometimes the chords
sound strange as time. But once you understood
the light was nailed shut, it opened like a door
into the next verse you’d been walking toward,
a verse about spring, cool water, boyhood.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
There’s a bridge leading you to the new shore
where daybreak came the way you thought it should.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door
into the last verse there was to explore.
Were you going to say you understood?
Don’t. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The light was nailed shut, then opened like a door.
—from Rattle #85, Fall 2024
Tribute to Musicians
__________
Jeff Knight: “I have played bar band and coffeehouse gigs in Austin (including with my old band Blue Haiku), have made money busking, worked for almost ten years as a professional songwriter for an educational curriculum company, and recently signed a contract (and got a paycheck) with Fervor Records to place some country-rock songs I co-wrote. I’m just a ham-and-egger on guitar but find that writing, arranging, and performing songs is satisfying in a similar way to poetry: you mess with it and mess with it until you think it’s done and then hope it will connect with people’s hearts and heads. And sometimes it does.” (web)
