Drive

On a strange day
in a life that’s becoming stranger
Myron is driving north of Kona
on a road bisecting the black lava landscape
when Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
comes on the radio,
and in no time at all he’s picturing himself
on a boat on a river
and marvelling for the first time
at that rhyme between
marmalade skies and kaleidoscope eyes;
not the skies and eyes
but the lade and leid
and just when his head
is filling with technicolor,
the black cloud, that’s sitting
on the mountains to the right,
moves across the sun
that’s shining on the blue ocean to the left
and the jumbled chunks of frozen black lava
that cover the landscape,
and suddenly the remaining light is sucked from the air
leaving everywhere
a dull monochrome.

This poem was published in The Galway Review a little while back but I thought it was worth bringing out again because of the recent anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper. The photos above are of the Beatles’ single featuring  Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane. My family got it’s first record player in the early sixties just when the Beatles and the rest of the British groups that formed the British Invasion were emerging. The first single we bought was “Needles and Pins” by The Searchers, a remake of a Jackie De Shannon song. My mom, older sister, older brother and myself would take turns every week to buy a record to build our collection. When I was back in Dublin a few years back for my dad’s funeral, I picked out the record shown above and a few others from our collection.  The sleeve has a picture on the front and on the back which was not typical at that time. Both songs were originally intended for the Sgt. Pepper album but were released early because they needed a single.

I can still remember hearing Strawberry Fields for the first time on the radio. The Beatles were busy spawning genres at the time but this was the strangest piece of music I had ever heard. It was and still is undefinable. Penny Lane wasn’t bad either.