To Sing Again

The sense of time is not fixed.
I have experienced days of such delight
that I have to suppress a tantrum
when those days are at an end.
I want to shake my fist at the sun, shouting,
"I know what you did.
I know you rushed your setting.
You and the moon both are impatient."
And the moon responds,
"Shut up and go to bed."

And then there is the way time can pass
where the night and its promise of sleep
seems to evade you
where even after a perilous journey to reach the end,
the end seems to go over the curve
and away from you.

Time can crawl
as it came to for a young man, a boy
whose days had once been swift
for they were full of joy,
whose open mind had made him
diverse and beautiful and full of song.
He was a seeker of the profound, of experience.
He even sought it in a fruit he knew to be false,
one that is an ancient poison of this planet,
and one that he sought it in so often
that he came to value nothing else.
So began his pain
and the slowing of the hands.

All his efforts
and all his thoughts
were now focused on survival
of a most insidious kind.
Like so much of the green life
that lifts only for the sun,
he now too served only one master.
And what a monster his master was.

He came to know excruciating eternities
within his days.
He came to feel so old inside.
So old he was nearly convinced
that he must have been there at the beginning
and since witnessed the entire unfolding of things.
And his loneliness was one of ages.

It stripped him of so much.
So much that he had become a stranger
to this world and to himself.
So much that even when he finally decided
that he had been enslaved long enough
and had parted ways with his master,
he still felt so lost.

Even on the road that led away from it,
the road that surely was the right one,
he was still filled with agonizing uncertainty.
Doubt was like an ice
that lived in his stomach
and made its presence known
in his neck
and in his hands and feet.

He was ashamed.
And there formed a great and terrible army
of all his weaknesses
and they marched on his heart.
More were brought into the fold everyday.
None could withstand the intimidating numbers
and the drumming that drowned out
all sense and reason.

When they finally reached the walls
of the last refuge of what once was,
the commander of this rabbling darkness,
a man in which they all coalesced,
a man whose iniquitous tongue
was curled around all their thoughts,
came forth and spat and barked hatred at the door
while the crowd cheered with unspeakable nastiness.
And then he finally broke it down.

There was naught inside
but a small child.
The man knowing no limits to his cruelty
raised his hand to strike
and at that moment the child looked up at him
and began to sing,

"I wish I could be your hero,
save the day,
fight that no tomorrows
will ever harm you."

The man stood there
baffled by such a defense.
But he stood listening.

He recognized the song.
It was one he had sung long ago.
He began to recall a memory
where he was in a flower garden
and he was bending down
to smell the red and yellow tulips
for they were his favorite.
And he was singing.
He loved to sing.
At night he would lie in bed and sing
until he fell asleep.

Now he recognized the child.
The child was that boy smelling the tulips.
The child was himself.

Feelings now welled up inside him,
feelings that he could not suppress,
that he could not control.
And he wept.
He was broken
but in the most beautiful way.

He no longer heard the mob outside.
They were gone.
All the angry voices had left.
And now he too began to sing.

They both sang so loud
so that their song might be heard
by the boy whose heart they stood inside.

And he did hear it.
And it saved him.
For it was the song
that was the deepest
and most sacred thing about him.
It could not be diminished
and it could not be conquered.

He has since entered the world again
and has made connections with people.
He sings for them
and for himself.

Perhaps long ago there was a mind,
a consciousness that stared into the void
and saw and heard a silence there.
And no longer willing to accept such a thing
opened its mouth
and sang the universe into being.

And the song flared forth
creating a rich vastness
where it continues to resonate
at the smallest and largest of levels.
It echoes in beings that sing their own song.
In the birds and in the bullfrog,
in the hyena,
in whale song
and in the wolf.
In the throat singers.
The yodelers.
The ones who hollered in the fields.
And in the boy
who stared into the void himself
and just before the song
would have been hushed forever
began to sing again.