✍️ July 13, Revisited
Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today
This imagined poem—July 13, Revisited—is written in the voice of Bob Geldof on the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, reflects on the event’s lasting echoes. Drawn from found diary entries and memory, it balances the heartbreak of persistent hunger with gratitude for the lives touched. It is a poem about effort, limits, and the kind of hope that keeps singing even when the world doesn’t change fast enough.
🎧 Hear the poem aloud or read at your own pace—whichever speaks to you today.
July 13, Revisited
by Scott Tilley
Found my old notebook this morning,
creases sharp as the chords we played that day, forty years gone.
The pages still smell like sweat and urgency.
“Make them care,” I’d scrawled beside the lineup.
“Make it matter.”
We did, for a while.
The phones rang off the hook.
The numbers were staggering,
but so was the need.
In Wembley, I watched Freddie hold the world in his fist,
a hundred thousand fists raised back.
In Philly, they danced under heat and sky,
believing a chorus could carry clean water to children.
Maybe it did. Maybe that was enough—for then.
I read now about drought,
the Horn of Africa withering again,
the same headlines repeating like old verses.
Still no rain. Still no real plan.
Forty years and the systems hold.
Tighter than ever.
But here’s what the headlines miss.
A girl named Alem, now a nurse in Addis.
She was five in ‘85,
her village fed by grain
bought with coins tossed into buckets at a Dublin pub.
She saved two lives last week.
That counts. Doesn’t it?
Or Joseph, in Nairobi.
He runs a radio station now.
Told me he first heard his own voice
on a donated tape recorder from a school
rebuilt with funds from a gig we threw in Glasgow.
That counts. Doesn’t it?
I kept every thank-you letter, every Polaroid.
I needed to remember that we weren’t chasing wind.
That somewhere, music bought medicine.
That a song bought time.
That attention, even if brief,
was a kind of dignity.
Still, the hunger returns.
Governments shift, economies crash,
charity is asked to do what justice should have done.
I’m older now.
I know the scale of the thing.
But I also know this:
We sang.
And some heard.
And some lived.
Maybe that’s not revolution.
But it’s not nothing.
It counts.✍️ Poetry Matters from Spirituality Today