Booming Echo

I heard something today.

A sound whose resonance is of history itself,

That breaks the mind of conventions and frees it to cloud nine and beyond,

A sound of flesh and blood, and heat,

A sound that fueled a fire no one could see.

What strange music it was.

From stagnation a gnashing of teeth against strings of a guitar,

I saw them born,

Coiled, battered, and many,

Thundering footsteps rocking mountains and shaking the house of white.

I heard their voices.

In the shadow of their forbears they spoke words of change,

And through their words, banners were struck down.

Hot blood bathed every ear and consciousness,

Adding city after city to their pyre.

Rise they said,

Listen to the children that you chose to ignore,

Raise a flower to the violence when nothing else is won,

Stand with us if you’re angry, stand with us if you’re proud,

Stand with us if you’d had enough; send the boom across the world.

I heard the crowd as the boom echoed on,

When the music began and oh what music did they play.

The air was filled with the sound of crashing bodies and echoing beats,

Children rose from their beds and leaders stopped counting their gold.

All listened to the beat, that echoing beat.

Now that boom is gone, its children gone too.

Thundering footsteps erased, its music drowned in the green tides.

Oh what a sad soul am I.

To have heard such beauty,

And yet can never truly see it.

I was never there when the boom draped the world in tie-dye color.

I was never there when the boom shook the populace from sleep.

I was never there when the boom made peace in the mist of bloodshed.

I am there when my mother speaks, when the stories leave her lips

And I am there when my father plays an old vinyl record.

And when the record stops and the stories end,

When singing becomes a whisper and the children drop to sleep,

When the leaders go back to their gold in the house of white,

When the boom is over it leaves something behind.

Echoes, it leaves echoes in our veins.

I.J Steinberg