What Was Sung To Us
My fellow Cornwallians,
before I forget, can I ask you
to recall the songs
you heard your grandfathers
sing, under their breaths,
when they thought no one
was listening, when they were
sitting alone in the cabs
of their tractors? And the tunes
their wives, your grandmothers
sang, when they were putting up
apples, trying to put the breeze,
coming from the orchard,
lifting off the swamp, into a jar.
Can I ask you to remember
what a neighbor said near
the counter in Longey's store
that later turned into a new
hymn? Or had such a beat
you could feel it, even in your
clay-caked boots. I wouldn't
expect you to forget the tapping
a loose shutter makes, when it can't
forget the wind was made
in the nearby lake, in the leaves
the smoke sends into our ears,
we have to make something of,
even if it isn't quite the pulled bell
in the roof of the Congregational
Church. And who's to say who
didn't hear a cow bellowing in
the back field and found their own way to hum it in a low register,
to bring it to mind, even in the dead
of winter, when the power lines
are down, when they can't sing
like cicadas. Like you, my fellow
Cornwallians, who hold all your songs
in your dreams, who wake before
dawn to sing them back into the barn
and the fields the barn stores.
You, who took the story of Ngawang
Choepel to heart. May I remind you,
he was the Tibetan young man
who studied nearby for a year
at the college and returned to Tibet
to save, to record the songs and dances
of his ancestors, his countrymen and women.
Who was jailed for saving that living
music and sending it out into the world,
keeping it, too, in the mouths of his cellmates.
Who, like us, will know how to sing themselves
Awake. We, who feel how the sun is free
to raise the deer from their unforgettable,
leafy beds. Who sing back what we can't forget
what was sung to us.
