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Scruggs Style

Our only god the clock
has the face of a banjo
& three efficient fingers.
On the weekends we get
behind its wheel & go.
Drunk & loud, you want
everything to clatter apart
at once: breakdown! But
we’re out of the mountains,
so it’s full speed ahead,
boys — rewind & play.
When Earl says the word,
the snow will return to the sky.

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«Medicine Show (3)Banjo Jubilee»

This entry was posted Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Books and Music, Poems & poem-like things and tagged banjo.  Print

2 Responses to “Scruggs Style”

1. Dianne at Rhythm of the Light says:

   February 9, 2010 at 11:58 pm

   three fingers, and not a hand to pick with.

   sigh

   powerful stuff.

   check out my local boys. Newly ensembled: Little Black Train. (I’m strongly encouraging more of their frailin’ banjo in their songs…)

   fondly,
   Dianne

   Reply
   • Dave says:

     February 10, 2010 at 10:48 pm

     Where can I find them online? All I saw on YouTube were covers of the song of that title. I liked the photo of your banjo-playing brother on your blog, though! Looks like quite a character.

     Reply

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This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

   

 

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    Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
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