In Memoriam
John Lennon would have been 73 today: this is a poem I
wrote for him at the time of his murder but there are still aspects of it which
are relevant today and it is good to be reminded of John and Yoko’s efforts to
bring peace to our world no matter how ‘unworldly’ there attempts appear now.
Flip Side of the Ballad of John
and Yoko
6pm News, Tuesday, Ninth of
December, 1980
“We have just heard from New York
Ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot
today . . . !!!!!!”
i
There I was sitting on a sofa
In one of the southernmost cities of the world
Listening to the radio whilst thinking about cooking
tea
Well, how can you be honest about how you feel?
I’d just turned the station over
To get the “real” news of the world
When I heard the words written above: well fuck me!
What else can you do but swear at a time like this
I am thinking about my mother, his mother
Two of the responsible for bringing us into the world
And now John, you’re gone! There’s only me
Yoko and me, and the rest of humanity together in
grief and love
Yoko’s in a black scumbag, I left the sofa
Wandered aimlessly around the room the day you left
the world
Your death is a climax of events forcing mortality on
me
Everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout Pol Pot, Nazism, Socialism,
I.R.A. and junkies
Give me a chance, brother
You have helped me understand this world
Now you’re dead, am I enslaved or
freeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
Fuck the revolution, we have bred another generation
ii
When it all began, I was just another
Beatle fan. A teenager from the other side of the
world
Looking for something more interesting than school’s
authority
Distances travelled in space, time and sorrow add up
to one thing
Your songs and books helped me discover
In myself, what all the education in the world
Could not; that I could write and illustrate my own
story
Knowledge to one is ignorance to another, unless there
is love
1968, Hey Jude, the death of my father and mother
Like a lost black sheep I entered the outside world
Sold my records, went to work in a dark, thankless
factory
If a person makes enough of one thing, he or she
becomes a thing
While I got lost in nothing, you found your lover
For whom you left the Beatles, left the wife, shocked
the world
Yoko, through the years of illusion, offered you
reality
Eternity may be a stone in Wales
And so, lest the press smother
You and your love both withdrew from the world
Which had built you a boat of fame, then left you all
at sea
How many oak trees have been allowed to grow from the
acorns?
“Just like starting over”
Is not starting over, you are now dead to the world
Sean and Yoko no longer have the shade and strength of
their tree
That fallen tree made them a house which they must
make a home
iii
We were always a decade away from each other
Yet we were of the same generation
You were the spiritual pathfinder
I followed to the point of penetration
And I never lost you, but let you go
It was not lack of love, but life itself, caused the
separation
Now you too have joined the dead and living dead
Who haunt and torment my existence
On this quaint and sadly crazy planet on which
To live is not just to breath, but an insistence
That each such breath is a test of courage and will
Which we understand at a metaphorical distance
Christ!
I know
It ain’t easy!
By Michael O’Leary
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