music

Always for All Things

Blow, silver trumpet—lead a loud refrain
Full of the glory of your perfect day.
Let four strong winds carry your song away
Until all worlds repeat its joyous strain.

Throb, golden lyre, with warm and welcome ring,
Through unknown spheres ablaze with cherubim,
The ecstasy of a thrice-holy hymn
Unmatched in time and place by those who sing.

Sing Him to Whom your melodies belong—
Sing Him of Whom their endless echoes cry.
Pour out His praise to infinite extents
Whose smile is twice the measure of your song,
Whose song, coursing through earth to highest sky,
Ravishes tired and tuneless instruments.

Today, for those of you who are unaware, is Canadian Thanksgiving. I’ve enjoyed the long weekend . . . Today I had nothing planned (we had a family dinner yesterday), so I ended up in Chinatown with a handful of cousins. We gawked around for a while, absorbing a little of the local culture, before stopping for a late lunch at one of my favourite restaurants in the area. Perhaps not my typical Thanksgiving Day, though it was great fun.

In any case, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time this weekend in a deliberate effort to feel thankful or grateful, and I don’t habitually do so. It’s a weakness of mine. I’m millennial enough that I take everything for granted. By the time we got home this afternoon, I felt unfocused and disjointed enough to warrant spending some time in Thanksgiving mode.

This sonnet is the result of that effort. It’s the first bound verse I’ve written in I-don’t-know-how-long, and it shows. But I think there’s something in it that’s worth hearing.

Feel free to leave comments!

Day Two

Yes, it’s been almost five months since I last posted. I have few excuses, really.

For three weeks in July and August, I toured Poland with the Hope Singers. Writing about a trip like mine can be hard—how does one accurately and objectively describe large-scale worldview adjustments? But here’s a poem (because who says poems need to be objective? Subjectivity is half their beauty) that begins to describe my tour experience. Or at least, it describes a program on our second day of tour.

Day Two 

have you seen
my heart?         I left it first
in Kolbuszowa, I think, at
the centrum kultury.         have you asked
Craig, the American?         have you asked
his wife?         his kids?         maybe
the lights guy knows

have you seen
my heart?         have you asked
our audience?         those unexpected people,
did they take it like they took
our program— our concert—
our muddled radośćią?         and call for
an encore?

have you seen
a heart full of prayer, and
half-learnt Polish texts, and connections
too vital to be faked?         a heart
full of sandwiches and coffee and hospitality?
have you seen  a heart
drenched,         a Szczebrzeszyn chrząszcz*
in a summer thunderstorm,
in a sudden outpouring of
foreign grace?

*Wół mnie pyta: “Po cóż pan tak brzęczy w gąszczu?”
We’d stopped in Szczebrzeszyn earlier in the day to see the beetle. Plus, Brzechwa’s famous poem remains one of my outstanding memories of tour.

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