One golden egg of the nineteen-twenties a hatch

Of music gold and gray, contradictory parable

Of a generation lost dancing under a ballroom dome.

Tenor saxophones and tenor banjos worked a trouble

In the blood, gin blurred the drum-beat's time-beat.

The you-can't-go-home-again blues got under the theme

Of anything goes, doorkeeper's thrown away the latch.

The twenties are fifties now, in our ears a ringing

Of morning-long-after music. Never no regrets, some loss,

Cried the brassy trumpet, the clarinet silver and ebony.

Heart and horn in sweet desperation of discourse,

A safe agony, advised us yet young to flee, flee,

Chords shaped in the shape of our sensibility,

By the violin modulated to a hint of lingering.

That was a good time. I was light on my feet as smoke,

Moving to those songs, whispering, would not be severed,

Never, ever, the girls I danced with said. Of a height

To look out over the lost heads, I could not, covered

In a loud dreary flood of stardust. A good time to float.

We danced a decade off the calendar, our day was night.

A generation lost in woodwinds and old war-smoke.