“Cassette Tape Years” (A Reunion: Coda Poem)
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© 2025 Alex Diaz-Granados. Cover designed for the Kindle edition by Juan Carlos Hernandez “Cassette Tape Years” For Jim, for Marty, for Maddie—echoes in two keys In corridors of sunlit youth, where voices trembled into song, a boy with history in his eyes loved a note too fragile to belong. The Winter Concert, velvet sound— a Schubert prayer, Ave Maria— he watched the solo fall like snow while silence held what words could be. A letter passed with trembling hands, final bells and summer haze— what he could not speak aloud hid in tape reels and school hallways. Seventeen years and northern skies, chalk and paper, wounded grace— the past returns in piano chords, her eyes: familiar, Marty’s face. Columbia’s towers weigh him down with echoes of Miguel’s despair, but Maddie’s hands across the keys remind him love still lingers there. And in the fire of hurt and fight, the scholar bleeds, the teacher bends— yet healing comes in quiet tones when letters ri...