This is David Freeland’s second poem for the Rag, following ‘Gary’s Bench.’ ‘Her song’ is a “celebration of the female voice and… a way to express my hope that the artistry of those who came before us might survive somehow, as a force of inspiration, even when the physical space that gave rise to that artistry is gone,” he says. “The above photograph is one I took of the legendary Prohibition-era/Harlem Renaissance jazz club, Small’s Paradise, in 1993.”

Her
song

begins:
A note rolls,
rattles the tables,
weaves through the air,
paints it sable,
shimmies on past
a banker and his flask.
Love me, it asks.

Watch it rustle
a gold digger’s hair,
circle a colonel,
ride on a tear.
Disappear?
I’d rather think
it leaves a print,
pressed to the night.

Someone will find it;
she’ll sing it to life.

                                     ~ David Freeland