Poem in the Bedroom, featuring Brooke Austen

Photo courtesy of Brooke Austen.

I started my band a little over four years ago, and it has since become the primary vehicle for my soul's ramblings. All of the lyrics we have used as thread in our musical tapestry once began as poems written on a bedside table, and that is one of the things consistently pulling me towards poetry as a form of expression.

I have always been enamored by poetry's ability to mold itself into virtually any other creative shape, despite its beginnings. I love the way writing can oftentimes become collage work, or like fitting together pieces of a puzzle. There have been many occasions in which I have found  myself lying in the debris of Franken-poems that act not only as a problem to be solved, but as their own solutions.   

Because of this, poetry feels invincible.  

The words themselves may live on through text, and if not through text, through oral history, and if not through oral history, through our very being. And while the last shred of the current poetic symphony composed over millennia upon millennia may fade away into nothing but dust and a memory, the impact it had will linger on and continue to chime its mission bells.

Poetry, the great shape shifter.

Ever transforming, ever surviving.

Nothing that I have ever written has remained unchanged. It could be due to my being a perfectionist to a fault, but I like to think of it as evolution. All that I have written has either grown with me, or has been tucked away into the shadows where my words may or may not eventually travel back out into the light. I can never truly tell.  

Yet there is one thing I know for sure: no matter where I go,  my spirit will forever lie awake at night with a poem in the bedroom.  

"Hush, Nightingale,  

crimson shadows over the moon glade  

shall not fall on this night,  

for the time has not yet come  

Make your home among the lilac,

although do not remain there long,  

for if tomorrow remained as it were,  

how would you ever find your song?  

You may meet with your lover there,  

you may see my reflection in your eyes,  

for I have breathed the breath of one thousand people,  

at once, yet from different times  

Come and find me, I have not the time to look for you  

I have too many places I wish to go,  

do not make it so that when the shadows fall upon the moon glade,  

I'll be swinging beneath the weeping cherries,  

in a garden on a star away from home."

Those are the lyrics to a song that began as a poem in my bedroom, the humble sanctuary where much of my creative conception takes place. That room where, for many of us,  our poems have been birthed, enveloped by death, and resurrected  since we learned to hold our pens in hand.

Brooke Austen is the singer and songwriter for the doom-blues band Grandma Strange. Their most recent album, Nightingale, is available on bandcamp. Vernon Meidlinger-Chin interviewed Brooke in February 2016. You can find that interview here. Many thanks to Brooke Austen for lending her voice to Floodmark!