🎶All that Jazz 🎶

A poem exploring the emotional landscape of jazz music as a form of spiritual expression.

This poem is part of the NaPoWriMo 2025 challenge to write a poem a day in April. This is the prompt for April 5.

The folks writing the prompts gave us three columns, each with twenty-one items, and instructed:

…today’s (optional) prompt is inspired by musical notation, and particularly those little italicized –and often Italian – instructions you’ll find over the staves in sheet music, like con allegro or andante. First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick a musical genre from the second column. Finally, pick at least one word from the third column. Now write a poem that takes inspiration from your musical genre and notation, and uses the word or words you picked from the third column.

I chose “lord have mercy” for my notation, jazz fantasia for my musical genre, and the words: bones and chain.

In night’s dim glow, 
     Headstones shift, bones rattle;  
A sequence of notes 
     Spills from brass and keys,  
Each sound a plea, 
     A soft invocation—
A call for mercy 
     Echoing through smoke.  

Fingers dance on strings, 
     Riffing, improvised,
Where rhythms pulse 
     (Like syncopated hearts)
Melodies rise, swell, 
     Breaking waves of sound,
A lament woven 
     In the air we breathe.  

Shadows sway, lost souls 
     In the spotlight’s beam;
Their stories etched in 
     Grooves, each beat alive;
Chains of memory clink, 
     A haunting refrain—  
Each improvisation 
     The past’s binding.  

The music swells, bursts
     Into a prayer,  
Bones of the earth 
     Call out in harmony;
In the space 🎶 between 
     The 🎶 
     notes, 🎶 
     we find—
A sacred silence, 
     Where mercy resides.

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