Music Camp
By Lora Berg
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
Missing home, I weep in the cabin. My best friend coaxed me here, my oboe, her violin.
She draws me to a hilltop. Hands enlaced, we see lightning slash divine letters across the sky’s bass drum. We’re late for rehearsal of Ode to Joy, where I can’t reach the high notes. My oboe has a crack my parents are saving to repair. I try not to care. English is my horn. Or alone, I swish through bluestem grass toward a stream I’ve found with a waterfall— when I spot broken bottles on the slate where I like to sit, and fill that glass with new bitterness against the breakers. Such ethereal young composers, exquisite minds, compositions like Chihuly glass wending across the hillside. Tom’s suicide. I think I might also be ethereal, but I’m carved in stone. Or I hide by a maple tree to watch a boy I like saunter by with a girl he’ll later marry. Cellists, they’re in conversation about John Cage and how he said, “Everything is music.” I weep away my summer, learn to write echoes, as of the lone trombone that ushers in the dusk and dawn. |
A current member of the Poetry Collective of Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Lora Berg writes with a light touch, sometimes on difficult topics. Lora has published a collaborative book with visual artist Canute Caliste, and poems in Shenandoah, Colorado Review and The Carolina Quarterly, etc. She served as a Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School and holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins. Among hats, Lora has served as Cultural Attaché at U.S. Embassies abroad and lived in several countries.