HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEONARD
Leonard Cohen is turning 73 tomorrow. His music figures largely on the soundtrack of my life. From “Suzanne” which I played on the guitar hundreds of times ever since I was an army conscript the year after I left school - to the hauntingly beautiful “In My Secret Life” released on his 2001 album “10 New Songs”
One of the oldest books in my bookcase is a collection of “Leonard Cohen Poems 1956 - 1968.” I bought this little paperback for the princely sum of R1.10 on 8 January 1973, the day after I turned eighteen. The little anthology has travelled with me the last nearly forty years - through many cities and little towns, through a marriage and divorce and a constant companion in the desert years. For the past decade, since ♥ girl and I moved into our current home, it has it special place in my collection - a little dog-eared and the pages turning yellow at the edges - it contains poems of beauty and sentences I’ve underlined in previous lifetimes.
I was paging through this little collection last night and remembered this lovely poem;
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LOVE ME
You do not have to love me
just because
you are all the women
I have ever wanted
I was born to follow you
every night
while I’m still
the many men who love you
I meet you at a table
I take your fist between my hands
in a solemn taxi
I wake up alone
My hand on your absence
In Hotel Discipline
I wrote all these songs for you
I burned red and black candles
shaped like a man and a woman
I married the smoke
Of two pyramids of sandalwood
I prayed for you
I prayed that you would love me
And that you would not love me
The enigmatic Mr. Cohen, many years ago
Happy birthday Leonard, and in the words of the equally unforgettable Robert Zimmerman;
I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now