BACH IN THE DC SUBWAY
by David Lee Garrison
As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.
A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.
***
Find the poem in David Lee Garrison‘s collection Playing Bach in the DC Metro, available at Amazon.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Lee Garrison earned his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, taught Spanish and Portuguese at Wright State University from 1979 to 2009, and is now retired. Garrison’s poems have appeared widely in journals such as Connecticut Review, Poem, and Rattle, and also in several anthologies. Two poems from his book, Sweeping the Cemetery, were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, and one was included in Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places. The title poem from his book, Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro, was featured by Ted Kooser on his website, American Life in Poetry. (Source: poetryfoundation.org)
FURTHER READING:
Pearl Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Washington Post
The Things We Miss: Violin Virtuoso Plays a DC Metro Station, huffingtonpost.com
WATCH AND LISTEN:
Joshua Bell plays a DC metro station (youtube.com)
Silver Birch Press 