SONG STORIES
You open
your mouth
and out pours
a river
carrying the rhythms
of fluids—
blood and lymph,
tears, synovial.
It is current, and source,
keeper of memories
and the stories
of your ancestors,
and mine.
Song is the lilting thing
passed down
from breast to infant lips,
from old warrior
to young hunter,
and passed on
lover to loved,
cricket to cricket,
across the fields
and through forests.
It is the play of wind
between mountains,
the Earth’s drumroll
pre volcano.
Song is the ancient
chants of the native peoples,
sacred contract
between the land
and the beings She
once welcomed,
and now strains to support.
Song is the chasm,
the lightening, the divide
between keepers of light
and keepers of darkness,
and those being born,
and those who are dying.
There isn’t a breaking dawn
without the heartbeat of earth,
the symphony
of wings rubbing together,
of claws scampering
up and down the trunks
of trees whose leaves
make whistle
out of breeze.
There isn’t a dusk that settles
without the howl of coyote,
the barking of prairie dogs,
rattle of snakes,
and the sea
with her incessant breaking
and pulling back,
giving rhyme
to the arrivals
and departures
of tides, and storms,
and stones.
Song is the hum
of all life,
natural and now
created—the talking
screens and the bots,
the drones
and the buzzing wires
that link us
and divide us.
Space,
that ultimate infinity,
was once thought silent,
but now we know
it’s out there, too—
the Song, wild and
roiling in the
gravitational waves,
bouncing
between howling
planets
and whistling
gasses,
celebrating the spaces
between things.
-Melinda Coppola