Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir
Etheridge Knight’s Blues
(for Eunice Knight-Bowens)
Behind bars you found your voice
and sang your down-home Mississippi Blues
about the Avenue that was Indiana
and you dug Wes Montgomery’s guitar
and sang the beauty of the sisters
but felt the pain of the wound inflicted
in Korea that led to the holes in your arms.
When I walk past the Barton Towers
at 555 Mass. Avenue where you lived
the last years of your life and passed
into spirit when your cells kept exploding,
I think of you on the 13th floor looking out
at the exotic Murat Temple where I heard
B.B. King’s guitar hold its drawn-out breath
for such a gut-bucket street singer as you
and at the red-brick German Athenaeum that
was almost demolished for a parking lot
until it resurrected like the phoenix where
beer-garden music rocks the summer night.
Indiana and Mass Avenues as you knew them
may be gone, but when sister Eunice took me
and sister poet Allison to stand at your grave
in Crown Hill Cemetery as her persistent way
of keeping your memory, your legacy,
and your song alive, I felt your presence
and knew you a free singer still be, brother.
I love your poems, Etheridge Knight.
I come to honor your spirit that will never die.
I say your song will always be sung
and the Blues shall always go on.
NK reciting the poem with bluesman Gordon Bonham on guitar.