Magellan's Log Copyright © 2001 Texas Chapbook Press
www.texaschapbookpress.com

Singing Lessons

The peony and the cat have no problem singing. Up they come and out the voices: peoniness and catness to perfection till falling silent.

We humans though spring forth, we of infinite voices, and think, once put to the world’s pain, we’re better mute. Why sing when all about are ruins, dumb runes of desolation past, signposts to distraught future?

I once knew a man, violent, vicious, vulgar, slow-learner he, who after sixty years of adolescent screeches found his voice and sang—oh, did he sing—a lovely decade’s worth of gentlest descant, heaping all the benevolence he could afford on those around him.

If he, damaged goods that he was, could find his voice, and I, scarred victim of his violence, can finally hear and applaud, who then, persistent, can fail at last to join the giant chorus, whether aware or not that that’s why we’re here?