Five String Banjo
(for Bill Foster)

The only breakdown
in your bluegrass dignity
is when a minor
smile escapes:
good banjo pickers never laugh.

Dancing the strings
like an afflicted spider,
your right hand
somehow knows exactly what
your push-pull-sliding
left hand needs:
notes come in cascades,
spirals,
runs.

Though bred to
Bach and oboes,
to fretless strings
I cannot resist you:
pick, frail, or strum, boy,
and I will yell
yahoo!

-- Warren F. O'Rourke, 1973

(In 1973 this poem won a first prize medal in the annual contest held by the Alabama State Poetry Society.) -- By the way, Bill Foster had a long career as Chairman of the English Department at the University of North Alabama; however, his alter-ego was "Doc" Foster, a celebrated blue-grass musician who -- with his wife and kids -- travelled the country in own used Greyhound bus. They were known as "The Foster Family Singers." Bill suddenly died in the summer of 2012 at the youthful age of 73. (His portrait appears above. . .the guy with the enormous white beard and a grndson in his lap.)