'If god exists, then music is his love for me'
Gwen Harwood - 'A Music Lesson'

The symphony for the century will begin

with the sound of a single cello

unearthly, long and slow

like something being drawn

from far below the surface;

a scraping, scratching sound

as a chair will catch that same strange note

dragged out from under a rope,

or an anchor line snagged miles below,

or the caught bones of the ploughed over.

Mother Russia, Leningrad winter,

the Somme, another damned forest of the dead;

all the familiar names of lost poets

and their scratched out secret letters;

you could go on naming them.

That note will sound clear and plain

and unwavering through

the rises and falls of faceless lives

and the pain and the first hopes

and the end of those hopes.

The symphony for the century

will begin with the clear

inhuman scraping of a single cello,

the echoes of folk songs

forever extinguished,

something haunting, that could accompany

a documentary in black and white,

and end on that note.

Published in The State of the Rivers and Streams (Five Island Press, 2002).