I have to tell you, the voice of God, if you really want to know, is Aretha Franklin.
—Marianne Faithfull

The power that lives in her Voice has been there from day one
and is made out of sounds, or from a resonance, getting closer
but never completely overwhelming, apart from its awareness
of how it is able to, like the deep-throated purr of a veldt cat
circling something at the centre; or the way the pour of raindrops
on tin roofs of houses, near the bitter end of town, grows
as it approaches, held at bay by the invisible baton of God.
A choir, though robed in the colours of loss, lifts everybody
and with lilting tone keeps them high. Aretha sang to the world
like a chorale throughout, from season to season, from childhood
to the edges of reason, till abruptly from that source one day
came no more warmth, of the kind a soothing sound copies
from nature; what a baby hears for nine months until in birth
it has to come and face its world, black-clad notes that danced
out of its mother’s mouth now dead like her. Aretha Franklin
is dead. I have come to a park near my home to let the birds know,
the same way a parent might hesitate into the children’s room
on the morning a partner has not woken up from their disease.
Birds don’t care; I watch them hop and fly from twig to twig
like they know something I don’t, the thing being that as I turn
around to leave the park I become more and more convinced
that wherever her voice was, these birds are singing with it.

(16 August 2018)

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Aretha Franklin (25 Mar 1942 – 16 Aug 2018)