A Song for Blind Billy
Poem by Thomas Harrison Humphreys
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In a city born ‘mongst the hills, Hills rolling twixt Blue Ridge and James, ‘Tis a fife can be heard tooting Like a muse singing of time now done. Listen and the sound will whisper, ‘Tis a maudlin Scottish refrain. Fluted by a dark mulatto, Himself born to Hill City chains. Blind Billy, he stands a playing, And Wandering Willy is then heard, A melancholy kilt-land air Well known to the town’s sundry folk. But oft’ his master, the town doc, Would call at merrymakings in the town With his choice Blind Billy in tow, And the fife would sing its descants From twilight till the next morn’s glow. In the Hills, Billy was a fixture, One known and trusted wide and far. And he knew every townsman’s voice Who greeted him in his darkness. Without fife, he was never seen, But with fife he was always heard, As the town would pause in wonder At the passions his fife playing stirred This Dixie town reared on shackles, Never knowing anything else, Manacled too by practice taught, For a moment, forgot its past, For a moment, stepped out of self, And … the town returned kind for kind. The Hill City purchased from its Sawbones Their Homeric minstrel’s freedom, That he might then and ever on Play his fife of his own accord. And he did, his fife ever thrummed. Wandering Willy had a home, As did Blind Billy on his own. Upon Blind Billy’s sad passing, A headstone was specially carved Rendering the Hill town’s mourning; For no one now would play so tender The airs the town had heard so long? So, ‘twas etched into the gravestone, a fife broken in muted still. Blind Billy now lay a resting, Having seen what seeing cannot: A moment’s love among inured hate When a town thought beyond its venerable dons, And forgot its nurtured state. Hear then the susurrating kilt-song Drifting along the sundry hills, A tune traded that shackles be broken, Wandering Willy, the bartered reel.
Thomas Harrison Humphreys, with a BS from the University of Lynchburg, is a history teacher in a small village who loves to talk to his students of literature. Thomas has been published in Westward Quarterly, Poetry Quarterly, Writers and Readers Magazine, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Written Tales and Mystic Publishers.