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You love our blues, our souls hung\r\nour spirituals sung and carried on breezes\r\nyet deny the truths that bring us to our knees\r\nour sorrows burrowed in battered hearts\r\nwounds deep reopened and salted\r\n\r\nCry for Katrina\'s dead, mourn\r\nour departed minstrels gone long before them\r\nthat smiled and crooned, kept secret\r\nthe politics of blue gloom notes\r\nlike Satchmo spreading wide his lips with\r\nappeasing pearl whites gritted.\r\n\r\nYou love the blues, the jazz, the cool and hot\r\nbut know not the people nor their lot\r\nnor demons wrestled, angels kissed\r\ndeath wails howled nightly \'neath shit\r\nbirthing music, the beauty, grace welded exquisite\r\ncreative genius hunkered to ankles, hips\r\nhearts weighted in painful joy of drunken stupor\r\ncultivating survival, incubating dreams\r\nsplitting tongues bursting the spiritblood\r\nyou love, you mourn, for which you do mock funerals\r\nbut why since what you love\'s not died?\r\n\r\nYou see the art but not the artists\r\nnor care to know the hearts that birthed the art of New Orleans\r\nnor her children who sing the blues crude\r\nbeautifully on the news. But you\'ll love that blues too\r\nonce the City\'s paupers have hammered it and\r\nglamoured it between tinkled ivory, the gleam of grinning trumpets\r\nand the depths of distant fingers upon a bass.\r\n