The Pachelbel

[image from google]

The first notes float across the room,
stilling my footsteps.
I know this music,
but I have never heard it before.

In sudden waking vision,
eyes open,
a body memory flashes:
row upon row
of dead-eyed, gray-blanketed women,
shuffling slowly forward in the bitter dawn
of a Gulag winter morning.
Instinctively, I know that
during one lifetime
I was there,
among them,
enduring the unendurable,
staying alive.

I listen as the music softly fades,
each note telling a complicated tale.
Decades later, I can still see
those suffering faces,
row on row,
always accompanied, in memory,
for me, with the opening passage
of the Pachelbel.


At Real Toads, the prompt was to write one's thoughts about a piece of music.