A rooster crowed – the villagers in their black dresses
and tata, their black suits, white white shirts,
the flower of their devotion. A pig ambled in the rain.
Then they began to open their mouths
to listen and find one another,
they began to fill up the mystery,
to waken our souls.
This blending of human voices,
low and high and humming, and lifting.
They sang themselves out of themselves.
They summoned their dead from under garlanded mounds,
the bright sails of their embroided names.
They sang them out of the depths of their ocean –
from their watery wrecks.
They sang for our brief moment here,
and offered up this,
this shattering blue cathedral of song.
Richard Langston
