"John Lennon" by Mary Jo Salter

Mary Jo Salter is a contemporary poet from Grand Rapids, Michigan! She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and has spent considerable time abroad (this influences a lot of her poetry).

Key terms: free verse, enjambment, apostrophe

John Lennon

The music was already turning sad,
      those fresh-faced voices singing in a round
            the lie that time could set its needle back

and play from the beginning. Had you lived
      to eighty, as you’d wished, who knows?—you might  
            have broken from the circle of that past

more ours than yours. Never even sure  
      which was the truest color for your hair
            (it changed with each photographer), we claimed

you for ourselves; called you John and named  
      the day you left us (spun out like a reel—
            the last broadcast to prove you’d lived at all)

an end to hope itself. It isn’t true,
      and worse, does you no justice if we call
            your death the death of anything but you.

II
It put you in the headlines once again:
      years after you’d left the band, you joined  
            another—of those whose lives, in breaking, link

all memory with their end. The studio  
      of history can tamper with you now,
            as if there’d always been a single track

chance traveled on, and your discordant voice  
      had led us to the final violence.
            Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan,

had catalogued your favorite foods, your views  
      on monarchy and war, and gaily clipped
            your quips and daily antics from the news,

I keep a loving record of your death.  
      All the evidence is in—of what,
            and to what end, it’s hard to figure out,

riddles you might have beat into a song.  
      A younger face of yours, a cover shot,
            peered from all the newsstands as if proof

of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.

This poem is an ode to John Lennon, famous for his work with the Beatles. Lennon was killed early in 1980, cutting his career and life short. Salter wonders in this poem what may have been different had he lived twice as long (he died at 40). The entire poem is an apostrophe, which means the narrator is speaking to someone who is not there. Salter gives us the impression that she never met Lennon, rather she was a "star-crossed fan" (notice the Shakespeare allusion). She evaluates what this means, what it means that we (American culture) "named / the day you left us / ... / an end to hope itself"; that we equated Lennon's death with the death of a movement, a culture, a belief system, and we weren't sure where to turn. I think she's asking a question that we all face at some point - what is the difference between fandom and reliance? And how to we truly respect people after they leave us? What's the best way to honor them?

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/172195