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Pain and Pride
Thomas R. Smith

After Ken Burns’ Country Music Documentary on PBS

Blurry black-and-white afterimage
of a boy or girl, of whatever color,
in poverty, deprivation, neglect,
possibly abuse. From such beginnings
the stories notably similar —
a provident mentor, desperate
persistence, finally a break. Moving
forward but always with that cargo
of damage, ending early or late
in catastrophe — the funeral performer
hardly able to sing for weeping
for the man who couldn’t abide happiness,
the woman with the pure heartbreak voice
crashed in a plane when she was barely thirty.
Is it any mystery that the hard-
living should love this music?
From deep in the soul of the country,
the keening sounds of ghost generations,
their loneliness and grief threading
through the good times when community
stood up to division. And the musicians,
some of them foolish and some sublime,
and many a combination of the two, flashed
their moment of pain and pride, burned the wealth
of their beauty and youth on the stage
for us to hear and see, gave themselves
in the way of people who have nothing,
before they in turn entered that earth
of the grandparents who worked unheard,
unseen, dismissed by the fast world,
to be welcomed by the memory
that cherished them, memory of the forgotten
ones they’d kept alive in their songs.

—
Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, most recently Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications), and has edited several books as well including Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (Graywolf Press). His first prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press), seeks to join imagination and activism in the nature poem.

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New Groove by Brian C. Billings
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