Claire Keyes

Black Orpheus Claire Keyes

It’s a love story, I tell my older, married sister. It’s won awards. You’ll love the music. As we watch I’m taken by exotic Rio de Janeiro, its grimy favelas barely containing the anguish of Orpheus. The characters are black and the music is black and Brazilian, the rhythms so propulsive the love story blooms in the melodic body of Orpheus. Plaintive, he plays his guitar, sings and plans to retrieve his beloved, a woman so lovely we know why Hades had to have her with him in the Underworld.

Around Orpheus wildly costumed people dance at a street festival invaded by Hades. Sadly, our hero loses his Euridice again. The music darkens as he grieves. When it’s over, I emerge with my sister exultant I’ve discovered a world where passion guides a life and life without music is inconceivable. It’s a world I want to enter and my sister turns and says I didn’t think there would be so many black people.

Can we talk about this? No. We don’t know how. We don’t even try.

Claire Keyes is the author of two collections of poetry: The Question of Rapture (Mayapple Press) and What Diamonds Can Do (WordTech). Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. Professor Emerita at Salem State University, she lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts and her poems have been published recently in Mom Egg Review, Turtle Island, One Art, and Persimmon Tree.