Troubadour: Nick Drake (19 June 1948–25 November 1974)
The world hums on at its breakneck pace;
People fly in their lifelong race.
For them, there’s a future to find,
But I think they’re leaving me behind. Nick Drake
I still walk beside you: a tall, stooped, quintessentially English presence.
I listen to how those flat Fenland vowels swirl into melodies
melded with the staccato RP of Cambridge.
So many minor key explorations of sadness;
pulling at the scabs of loneliness and regret.
Your songs made plangent by the melancholic timbre of your voice.
Your abiding mood was irresolution, your secret, regret.
You never lost your fragility of the heart
and my emptiness of soul was filled,
at least sparingly, by your gentle, observational lyrics
words that lifted your songs into a poetry that very soon broke my heart.
And that’s my mea culpa
I cannot listen to your achingly beautiful music
without admitting to myself, again, your poems’ terrifyingly simple truth
that nothing abides except love.
