Song of a Place

On the daily headspa blog we've just started a new weekly topic - sense of place is what we're looking into this week.

In the first post of the week today we brought up the way music connects us to place, using an interview from a program on Sunday night here in Australia with Lucinda Williams. You can read that excerpt, get to the vodcast with Lucinda, and find out more about Nacogdoches, Texas here at today's post on daily headspa.

In reflecting on the topic and the post myself tonight, I remembered this poem by Dennis Brutus: It's not a song, but it's title evokes the way music and memories of place are so often fused. Poetry is music anyway, eh?

Nightsong: City

Sleep well, my love, sleep well:
the harbour lights glaze over restless docks,
police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets;

from the shanties creaking iron-sheets
violence like a bug-infested rag is tossed
and fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell;

the long day's anger pants from sand and rocks;
but for this breathing night at least,
my land, my love, sleep well.


The poem, which I found in a book I bought in one iconic place where I have lived, London, reminds me of another iconic place that is so very special to me, Alice Springs in the central desert of Australia. It's a place I want to sing to, a place of sand and rocks and violence and the day's long anger. It makes sense to me that the poet is a South African freedom fighter in terms of this connection to Alice, a place with its own still open wounds of struggle and colonial racism.

Dennis Brutus was imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned. Tonight I am remembering a time of singing in Alice Springs, singing freedom songs in the community choir; songs about Robben Island. For me it was a time and place of great connection to other people, to the land, to a sense of place that, while not my own, nevertheless drew me in.