New York Tendaberry by Laura Nyro

I'll never forget the first time I drove back to New York after visiting my family in Philadelphia a week or so after 9/11 - the visceral pain I felt as I hit that spot on the New Jersey Turnpike where the skyline of lower Manhattan would reveal itself and I was punched in the stomach with the horror of those two gaping holes (smoke still rising from them) in the skyline of my city. I just broke down. But by the time I had actually entered Manhattan and was driving across 57th Street toward the Queensborough Bridge and home I felt this overwhelmingly deep, visceral love for this city, my home fill my entire being and the song that rose up in my mind was this one - and I began to sing...

New York Tendaberry
Blueberry
Rush on rum
of brush and drum
and the past is a blue note
inside me

I ran away in the morning

New York Tendaberry
blueberry
rugs and drapes and drugs
and capes
Sweet kids in hunger slums
firecrackers break
and they cross
and they dust
and they skate
and the night comes

I ran away in the morning
Now I'm back
Unpacked

Sidewalk and pigeon
you look like a city
but you feel like religion
to me

New York Tendaberry
True berry
I lost my eyes
in the east wind skies

Here where I've cried
where I've tried
where God and the tendaberry
rise
Where quakers and revolutionaries
join for life
the precious years

Join for life
through silver tears

New York Tendaberry

Kathryn O'Connor