Sylvia's Song

Sylvia's Song
by Moe Seager


January, 2009

Dear Sylvia,

I wish you to know: how many evenings, slipping into nocturne, twilight dusk, a gray shadow merging into violet, I trek to the club, to hear my favorite singer. I seek more than entertainment, more than art for arts sake. I come looking, listening for consummate satisfaction. Jazz!

I need raucous laughs and then some. I fill with glee generated by one who feels the funny side of blue, who bares from inside out, a genuine smile. A woman whose giggle and chuckle is what we emit as breath of life. Nobody laughing at each other, but, with each other. Call it medicinal. Call it vitamin vivant. Your jokes, relaxing. Your smile, intoxicating. Bring it home.

You, a stunning example of a beautiful woman of a beautiful voice. Elegant. Eloquent. I need to hear you sing the songs of my restless mind, my troubled soul, stir my soft, so tender center. Songs of Love and Love lost. Songs conveying a message. A beacon of hope. Resolve in the face of despair. We stay in the game against the odds. Beauty is stubborn.

You're a woman whose charisma is forged from the fires of trials and try again. I need to hear - night time is the right time and right time is now! This is musical Zen. Elixir.

I thrive on testimony. Redemption transmitted on voice waves, amplified calls of my scattered family. Me, a stranger in a strange land, no longer estranged. Born again, birthed in the sweet and bitter sweet notes of the ancestors whose legacies flow on the melodic phrase of your wail and coo. Spellbinder, your moans and groans trigger a simultaneous release relief throughout the crowd. You belt out notes from the primal code of the human race. Harmony.

I need to bare up. Immerse into community because no man is an island and all too often it takes the naked impulse of a woman to recall that which I might put aside for the seemingly pressing calls to transparent routines, anemic rituals. I need to scrap compulsions to list my short comings before a condemning judge - my deranged consciousness. I need to exit the suffocating quagmire of dollar down - dollar a month - never enough. Never enough to quiet the ceaseless demands of the uphill climb against downward winds just to find myself one brick shy of a load. I need to witness. The call and response that binds us. You and I, all those present, all who would be...

I want it known, I walk toward dawn through empty nights, full of vigor, humming phrases you have sung hours earlier. You were here and I was present then, now. Sing lady sing, "In the Dark".

I glide home on weightless twin hued lights of silver and onyx. Against menacing cold your songs wrap me warm. I kiss your lips, imagination enough. Human Being Human. I carry these little things in the pockets of my day, and nights. Charms.

This poet realizes this state precedes language. It being murmurs of heart, beat of the the soul in step with a turning planet shuffling its way through the cosmos of mysteries and wonders. What could this moment be named? Magic.

You are a gift. In exchange for your value I offer the currency of my immeasurable admiration.

Baby, you shake the diamonds from the diamond dust.

In the spirit,
Moe Seager

Sylvia Howard is a jazz vocalist. Our Paris Diva, she is renowned to audiences, her legion of fans,  in Paris, the United States and Asia.
www.sylvia-howard.com