A Servant of the Muse

for Ed Turley

I think if you’d have asked him if he was finished,
He would have said no, though his time here has ended.
I think he would have taken comfort that the music
Which paused awhile within him keeps searching this world
For other hearts in which to nest,
Music being the heart’s salvation as long as hearts beat,
And there remaining so many that long to hold it closely.

Music remains, the world being made of song,
Like money, you can’t take it with you.
And he wouldn’t have anyway,
Being but a conduit, a servant of his muse,
Only temporarily was music his gift to give,
He left it behind to echo within us.
I believe it would have been his wish
That we shelter these rhapsodies of the soul.
Though we grieve his passing, we’re blessed by his return
Each time a piano is, on this earth, somewhere played.

Autumn into Winter

The sun, under a blanket of cloud
a slow rising old man, not yet about his work
of turning the sky to blue,
after putting away the stars where he can find them again.

Two ruby throats,
already busy working blossoms of bee balm
caught in a shaft of sunlight,
gather sustenance for a pilgrimage,
following the sun, their fickle goddess,
as she migrates south for the winter,
taking her blossoms with her.

Larry Schug is the author of eight books of poems: Scales Out of Balance (1990), Caution: Thin Ice (1993), The Turning of Wheels (2001), Arrogant Bones (2008), Nails (2011), At Gloaming (2014), and A Blanket of Raven Feathers (2017) – all published by North Star Press of St. Cloud, Minnesota – and a chapbook, Obsessed with Mud, published by Poetry Harbor (Duluth, Minnesota). Caution: Thin Ice was a 1993 Minnesota Book Award finalist and Arrogant Bones was a 2008 Midwest Book Award finalist. Larry has won two Central Minnesota Arts Board Individual Artist awards, a 2014 Central Minnesota Arts Board Established Artist award and a 2008 McKnight Fellowship for Writers award. Larry lives beside a large tamarack bog with his wife and their dog and cats in St. Wendel Township, Minnesota.