Far Singers Join by Kim Stafford

— for the music bearers who carry our common light across generations and borders.

In their distant countries, each bird

drank from a different spring. Each

flew here from a different forest.

The sky was wide, their tongues small.

The wind loved their feathers all.

 

Far away each bird had hidden

where bullets flew. Some had left

a father behind, a mother, a fledging lost.

Here, a great silence awaited them.

At first they hid in the trembling leaves.

 

Around our clearing, each twig

held two small feet, and the soft

weight of a song we had never heard.

Wind stirred the leaves, and became

the breath of each singer.

 

Remembering their nesting grounds

far away, they sang their longing for home, as

their singing joined here in mysterious harmony

we had never heard. How but in music

could we know one another?

– Kim Stafford