The Sunday Poem: “Resonator” by Robert Walicki

April 12th, 2025

The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.

Robert Walicki reads his poem at its conclusion.

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The 1963 album On the Scene by Johnny Beecher (a.k.a Plas Johnson)

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Resonator

On a scratched record Saturday,
I learned the blues
in a water-stained Pittsburgh basement
where my mother’s records hid,
her handwritten name inked on each sleeve,
signed off like a confession.

Summers, I played under one dirty light bulb alone,
both parents working. I staged fights in space
with action figures on distant planets
and still I wanted to go further.

I didn’t know my Search for life
would find Johnny Beecher
When I slid the one disc she had of jazz,
uncertain in my hands like a drug.

I set the needle down and the flood rushed in,
its itchy sax entering the room
like a duck in heat,
a moan after a beat down,
an organ falling to the bottom of the ocean.

My head inside its churning tide
while I sat down on the floor,
legs crossed like I could ever be grounded again
so I followed those first throated notes
down like a swallowed buzz

I didn’t know how I was going to feel
next year, standing bedside to my grandfather,
of the cup he was given to help him stop shaking.

But I filled his last nights with my own kind of moving
In those lost track afternoons
of discovery.
That slow, haunted world I was stepping into.

Listen to Robert Walicki read his poem

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Robert Walicki’s poems have appeared in over 50 journals. A two-time Pushcart and a Best of The Net nominee, Robert’s second chapbook. The Almost Sound of Snow Falling was included in the exhibition catalog for New York’s Poet’s House, and his latest full-length poetry collection is Fountain from Main Street Rag Press. His forthcoming poetry collection, Watershed, will be published by Broadstone Press.

Listen to the 1962 recording of Johnny Beecher performing “Sax 5th Ave.” [The Orchard]