Tune

Tune

Tune

When I came back from Europe late last year
a new tune kept running through my head.
It still recurs at odd times of the day,
haunting like a perfume or a face.
Its clean string of notes obsesses me.

I cannot write it down; I have no key.
I can’t translate it to another code.
I cannot even hum it to myself.
It has to sing itself inside of me.

I heard it first in Prague on Charles Bridge –
early summer evening, cloudless sky –
where exiles from a grey dictatorship
played their haunting high Andean flutes
among the rows of buskers waiting there.

Expatriates, tourists, dissidents, passers by –
an ancient tune of sorrow pierced with joy –
those refugees, those exiles far from home
playing their haunting high Andean flutes;
this place of wandering scholars, vagabonds.

I heard them two months later playing near
the market place at Cambridge in the rain:
their piercing flutes’ insinuating song –
its cry of joy, its almost desolation –
hungry for home and all its idioms.