I struggled over the past few days to write a fitting tribute to my dear friend, our dear friend, David Fetcho, but I was fortunately spared the agony of finding fitting words by Jim Friedrich, who wrote an extraordinary piece you can read here. And I highly recommend that you do.
David’s interests and talents were so varied no small circle of the world could contain him. He moved deftly and masterfully through the various communities that made up his life, offering his bright light, creative genius and kind heart to each one. A multi-instrumentalist, shape-note singer, performance writer/performer, poet and theologian, among other things, David’s life was a pilgrimage in which he created his own holy sites wherever he rested.
I knew him primarily as a poet. He was the first poet I met when I arrived in California in 1976, fresh from the farm in Oklahoma. He welcomed me into a writer’s workshop associated with the former Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF), then reformed as the Berkeley Christian Coalition/House Church of Berkeley, and I found my vocation. When I began organizing poetry readings for Radix Magazine, David was nearly always on the bill, arriving with poems that seemed often like imagic symphonies.
We collaborated on an interview (or two) with our mutual friend William Everson (Brother Antoninus) for William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts, published in 1996. Fetcho’s contribution to that project, in terms of ideas and questions, was profound and essential.
David wasn’t great at self-promotion: he always had better things to do, like creating new work. We can be grateful, however, that he left us an extraordinary album, “Watch it Sparkle” (Brutal Resonance Magazine’s Album of the Year, 2015) and other work that can be accessed on his Soundcloud page.
I’m grateful and I feel honored that Susan Fetcho invited me to be with David after his stroke, when she made the difficult decision to take him off the ventilator and let him go. I arrived just a few minutes before he passed, and read him this poem by Rumi:
Silkworms
by Rumi
The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
Call it to your arms where it can
change. A silkworm eating leaves
makes a cocoon. Each of us weaves
a chamber of leaves and sticks.
Silkworms begin to truly exist
as they disappear inside that room.
Without legs, we fly. When I stop
speaking, this poem will close.
and open its silver wings…
(trans. Coleman Barks, from the collection, The Glance).