“Cassette Tape Years” (A Reunion: Coda Poem)

© 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 rise from buried ends.

The gift of grief, the grace of truth,
the chance to dance again in light—
redemption hums through Moonglow's chords,
the past not vanished, but made right.

So let the tape rewind once more—
a kiss, a song, a letter read—
for every chapter lost to time
returns in what the heart has said.