Your Gift

Written for Poetry Jam Challenge – a new one I have just discovered over on BlogSpot.
Click the link to find out more. http://poetryjaam.blogspot.fr/

You play the saxophone as if you were born with a reed in your mouth,
Even at your mother’s funeral you perform without
a note displaced.
You play a piece your mother used to sing along to
on the radio,
a song that as a boy you believed belonged to her.
There is not a dry eye in the Church
and yet, like the musicians on the Titanic,
You play on,
Wrapped in an invisible embrace.
Touched by music the power dilutes to us.
Emotions carried through F sharps and B minors,
I watch your face.
Eyes closed.
Breathing through the silver saxophone.
Like an iron lung it supports you and gives you life.

The father in that musician is the one
I dreamt of having.
Getting to know you off stave, a more complicated notation.
I realise now it is music you belong to.
A parentless man
destined to share his final breath
with a woodwind instrument.
The same mouth rarely tells me of love
or unconditional feelings.
I have to let you carry me with melody alone.