Simone. Bird. Miles. Roberts.

Bill Cushing
January 2022

Ode to Nina Simone

Transforming us with blues, boogie-woogie,
using training in classics to quash rage,
she dug into our souls, tore open hearts, exposed our psyche.
Before King’s dream, she mounted battles onstage
from Harlem to Carnegie, leaving beloved Bach behind,
she battered walls of injustice, rattled abusers’ cages, yet
allowed herself to be battered, her sanity strewn.
Nina, a Harlem Renaissance soul out of time,
whose good intentions drown in madness and regret,
infused righteous power into every tune.

Listening to Bird

Flying through scales
he did the impossible, stretching

staccato sounds,
stopping only to change direction.

He found places
in his search for every note

not imagined:
leaving chromatic gravity,

breaking confines,
shooting up into infinity;

then he rested,
hanging on a single, random chord;

bending branches
of music (but never breaking them),

lingering
wherever he chose, staying

just long enough
to make it his territory

and his alone.

“Music isn’t about standing still and being safe.”
— Miles Davis (1926 – 1991)

listen

two weeks after you died
a quarter-million thronged
by the St. Johns River
to hear the music you had spawned
hoping to see you
but
even in death
you never looked back

they were all there

Hannibal        Bird
Chick               Jo-Jo
Red                   Jaco
Bean                Dizzy
my favorite   Freddie Freeloader

isolated
you
were a beacon

a flagship for messages

of the heart

back to the crowd unbowed
that proud dance-walk
announced by muted horn
that spoke
and broke
through all the bull
and told us about a place

Miles

ahead of everyone else
you spent a lifetime

thinking for yourself
speaking to every generation

playing it all:

jazz    blues
funk   rock
fusion

categories took
a backseat
to creativity

and rhythm

space

and feeling

spirit

I remember fourth grade
picking up a horn
then laying it down
rock and roll was my world
what did I know

seven years later I heard

it was in the Garden
where you brought me back
to music

I walked all the way home

Miles

from that train station
my head pounding with sounds
frantic-fast as the subway
I spent the night on

those African rhythms
you used decades
before anyone else
even thought to

filling my head
letting me know
I’d have it all down cold
if I could walk
as cool as the notes you heard

coming from

Miles

you had that thing

that style

that spark that was

a blue flame

jumping
off a gas stove

igniting everything   everywhere
touching the genetic
resonant
frequency
in all

Singing with Both Hands (for Marcus Roberts)

With eighty-eight steps to choose,
how do the pianist’s hands
decide which to use?
Perhaps each acts alone:
one as the heart, maintaining
clockwork tempo, balanced
beating

as blood and milk—giving life in
obsidian or porcelain.

The other wanders free,
travels against rhythm: turns
at times unknown, sees
dead ends, backtracks to
others, sometimes climbing yet
always acting in concert.
Or not.

◊

Bill Cushing recently retired after teaching in Los Angeles area colleges.  He facilitates a writing workshop for 9 Bridges Writers Community. Bill’s work has been in anthologies, literary journals, magazines, and newspapers. His most recent collection of poems is “. . .this just in. . .”. Earlier volumes include “A Former Life,” released in 2019 by Finishing Line Press and honored with a 2020 Kops-Featherling International Book Award, and a chapbook, “Music Speaks,” winner of the 2019 San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Award and medalist in the 2021 New York City Book Awards.