John Lennon by Mary Jo Salter

Question 1

1. the music was already turning sad, _____________

Answer 1

those fresh-faced voices singing in a round–

Question 2

1B. the lie that time could ________________

Answer 2

set its needle back, and play from the beginning.

Question 3

2. Had you lived to eighty __________________

Answer 3

as you’d wished, who knows?

Question 4

2B. –you might have broken from the circle _______________

Answer 4

of that past, more ours than yours

Question 5

3. Never even sure ______________

Answer 5

which was the truest color for your hair

Question 6

3B. (it changed with each photographer), _______________

Answer 6

we claimed you for ourselves;

Question 7

3C. called you John _________________

Answer 7

and named the day you left us

Question 8

3D. (spun out like a reel– the last ________________)

Answer 8

broadcast to prove you’d lived at all

Question 9

4. an end to _________________

Answer 9

hope itself.

Question 10

4B. It isn’t _______________________________

Answer 10

true, and worse, does you no justice

Question 11

4C. if we call your death ________________

Answer 11

the death of anything but you.

Question 12

5. It put you ___________________________

Answer 12

in the headlines once again:

Question 13

5B. years after you’d left the band, you joined another– of those _____________________________

Answer 13

whose lives, in breaking,

Question 14

5C. link all _______________

Answer 14

memory with their end.

Question 15

6. The studio of _________________

Answer 15

history can tamper with you now,

Question 16

6B. as if there’d always ______________________

Answer 16

been a single track chance traveled on,

Question 17

6C. and your discordant voice ____________________

Answer 17

had led us to the final violence.

Question 18

7. Yet like the times when I, a star-crossed fan, ________________________

Answer 18

had catalogued your favorite foods,

Question 19

7B. your views on ________________

Answer 19

monarchy and war,

Question 20

7C. and gaily _____________________

Answer 20

clipped your quips and daily antics from the news,

Question 21

8. I keep a loving record of your death. All the evidence ____________

Answer 21

is in–of what, and to what end,

Question 22

8B. It’s hard to figure out, ________________

Answer 22

riddles you might have beat into a song.

Question 23

9. A younger face of yours, _______________

Answer 23

a cover shot,

Question 24

9B. peered from all the newsstands ______________

Answer 24

as if proof of some noteworthy thing you’d newly done.