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Missing You. The Loss of Linda Ronstadt’s Voice — 2 Comments

  1. The dancer slows her frantic pace
    In pain and desperation,
    Her aching limbs and downcast face
    Aglow with perspiration

    Stiff as wire, her lungs on fire,
    With just the briefest pause
    The flooding through her memory,
    The echoes of old applause.

    She limps across the floor
    And closes her bedroom door…

    The writer stares with glassy eyes
    Defies the empty page
    His beard is white, his face is lined

    And streaked with tears of rage.

    Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
    With passion and precision,
    But now his mind is dark and dulled
    By sickness and indecision

    And he stares out the kitchen door
    Where the sun will rise no more…

    Some are born to move the world
    To live their fantasies
    But most of us just dream about
    The things we’d like to be
    Sadder still to watch it die
    Than never to have known it
    For you, the blind who once could see
    The bell tolls for thee…

    • “The bell tolls for thee…”

      It all started with John Donne’s Meditation which became the poem For Whom The Bell Tolls

      John Donne
      Meditation 17
      Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 1624

      “No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee….”

      …and eventually morphed into Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1940 novel about the Spanish Civil War.

      A phrase became classic and traveled through time, it was carried into pop culture through the years. And now is in another pop song. You have associated it with Linda Ronstadt. Going back to Donne, full circle: no man is an island, we are all interrelated and affected by each other.

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