*
Sally Cragin is an award-winning journalist who wrote the local music column Cellars by Starlight for Boston Phoenix, and who has written about music for the L.A. Reader, Rolling Stone, and many other papers. Poetry and fiction has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Boston Review, Penman Review (University of Southern New Hampshire), Somerville Journal, and a variety of other small magazines in various states of activity and many other columns as well. Her books, The Astrological Elements and Astrology On The Cusp I (Llewellyn Worldwide) have been sold in numerous countries overseas and domestically. She teaches folklore and history at Fitchburg State University and has served in public office since 2008, most currently as a Councilor At-Large for Fitchburg, MA.

Sally Cragin

The Things My Friends Brought to the Joni Mitchell Concert

Sometime at the end of the 70s
Joni Mitchell played the Providence stadium.
This was after Hissing of Summer Lawns,
and her transition to full-on fusion jazz goddess.

Was it hard for her? To
step out of that flower minidress
into a fedora and maroon midi skirt.
She brought her band,
determined to create intimacy
at a municipal civic center.

Even from where we sat, midway back
her cheekbones cast shadows,
She only looked at the crowd
at the end of each song
And our applause was rippling and respectful

I sat among a bunch of girls,
swaying like stalks of wheat
in the wind.

And each had brought a gift –
and kept saying as if in a daze –
oh, if only I could meet her,
I just want to thank her.

One brought a poem,
another brought a gilded box,
but the shyest girl had made a mobile,
out of shells and feathers
found in the woods.
She’d wrapped it carefully,
but took it out before the show,
it turned and twirled in elegant silence
when she breathed on it.

& & &

A thousand years later,
my brother Hal got a call
from a producer he knew, in LA
to record a session with Joni –
at her home in Laurel Canyon.
He brought his bass, and
“she went to the piano
to work out ideas”
on a piano
“with her dulcimer collection on top.”

He spent a full day in the hills,
and she smoked throughout.

Joni lived alone,
in a house surrounded by lemon trees
which she and her gardener tended faithfully.

Apart from the music, Hal said
a re-engineering of Hejira –
for a ballet company in Canada –
her most vigorous conversation
was with her gardener about the
lemons which grew, and dropped
endlessly on her lawn.

 — Sally Cragin

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