Two Poems
Janet Kenny
Antal Szalai’s Gypsy Band in an Australian Country Town
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The country concert hall is full
of old Hungarians who’ve come
from miles away to hear the thrill
of tarogato, cimbalom,
but most of all—the violin.
And what a violin! They say
that after he had heard him play
Yehudi Menuhin embraced him,
so deeply had Szalai impressed him.
When they start there’s such a shock
as though the world had run amok
sound rips around the walls and hits
the ceiling, strikes the metal parts
of doors and watches, and the hearts
of sleepers who have come to life,
and young again, accept the knife
of youth and pain; the lightning bursts
in every space and now it’s Liszt’s
transfiguration, Gypsy grief
and desperation, time the thief,
it weeps then changes with a bang,
to pure delight as high notes hang
above the hall so high they hurt
with panpipes conjuring a bird;
they’re old, this audience, and know
that this is love, the silent bow
that holds suspended all they are
then lets them down through sunlit air;
the gypsy and the bird are free
like them, they leave him thankfully
in songs and dances, out the door
to Queensland which they never saw
the way they see it now, with strings
to all the loved remembered things.
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Janet’s notes: “Music has always been central to my life. No matter where I lived or what I was doing, music sustained and inspired me. This, my first poem, was a landmark in my new life. I was grateful to Anna Evans and Quincy Lehr for featuring it as a model poem for those submitting to Raintown Review. I also am grateful to Karen Kelsay for publishing it in my first collection, This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press). After moving back and forth between cities and countries, I found myself living in a beautiful small town in rural Queensland. Although my New Zealand childhood helped me to adjust, I sometimes longed for those lost familiarities. It was my husband’s encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure musicians that found us driving to a nearby rural town to attend a concert by performers who were unknown to me. And this is what happened. The poem is one convulsive rush because so was the concert.“
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After Gaza
Let the bright music drown our grief.
Music alone can bring relief.
Nothing contrived can lift our mood.
Only the light from music could.
What we have seen we should not know.
Music alone can make it go.
We are the children who have lost
innocence, courage, love and trust.
Let the bright music lift our hearts.
Courage returns when music starts.
What we have witnessed will not fade.
Music is what the world betrayed.
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Janet’s notes: ​​“No words are needed to explain this poem. We are all the children in the poem.“
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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.
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