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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

RIP Michael Been

Michael Been, lead singer/songwriter for the semi-obscure post-punk band "The Call" died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 60. He was to music what Flannery O'Connor was to literature. He was someone who described his musical and spiritual journey as the "slow wearing away of ignorance." He understood the realities of grace — both wonderful and terrible — better than most. I count myself very fortunate to have discovered his talent in my formative years. Tribute poems are seldom good, and I seldom have written them, but here's one — for what it's worth. RIP Michael Been.



God arranges to have certain people
Born in Oklahoma, where Union Pacific
Lines are straight as the skyline
Save for the earth’s curve,
And twisters noose downward from cliff-clouds
To lasso thin towns and two-lanes.

Your voice is still heavy as blacktop —
Grace and mercy washed against
The cinder block basement-wall of law.

In back country like this —
Jungled up in the scrub next to the tracks,
Sharpened against the edge of hot panhandle nights —
The ache for a glimpse of treeline or riverbank
Leaks
Into every voice you might carry to the world.

In ways like this
God arranges to grant to the earth
The meek,
Those who know well to whom we die,
To whom we’re to be reconciled.

They lead us through the desert,
Some urgently singing at each fork in the path;
The mocking governments, the mocking mainline,
The mocking fringe, the mocking world
Held fast — dumb — by the throat
While the poor in spirit snake by.

It’s a violent grace —
A dam-breaking,
House-swallowing,
Brother-drowning grace.

It presses even the preacher
Until the preacher cries out
“Hell’s been raised!”

And there in the ending of all moments
There is mercy in Hell.