What song is this?

You lit a candle once, a plea for life yet unformed,

but longed for just the same.

I long for this life still, now my own, emerging from shadow into shape,

Pouring out from that cathedral to the hermitage of my heart.

A single, unbroken prayer. 

What song is this?

You dreamed of me, a song whose words you had forgotten. 

While I too seek these words, not lost, but yet unfinished

Self-composing recklessly in the great symphony of my becoming. 

You have memories, as do I, of car rides and foolishness; concerts and creativity, 

Bliss of insights and agonies of vision. Melodies of childhood growing more complex,

Giving way to subtler stanzas. 

New notes rise and fall, forming, extending, reaching, grasping, growing, 

painting the distance of time with sweeping sounds of selfhood.

What song is this? 

The sharp note of disease, softened somehow by a metal chair in a church basement. 

A new baseline echoes, strong and rhythmic, a drum to tether all to itself. 

Its beat feels like wholeness. 

The orchestra swells, and yet- someone waits in the wings- or worse

She is locked behind the bars of forced forgetfulness (perhaps a tender act of kindness, if ill-

Informed, from body to brain.)

The notes have reached her now though, a tiny whisper piercing the silence of her isolation. 

The bars open, and she is restored, rising to sing the hymn of her deliverance from bondage. 

She whispers sweetly in her jailor’s ear- what of the rest?

What song is this? 

I hold the keys. 

This is the new song, a cacophony of liberation, synesthesia in shades of blue.

A chorus rises, voices lifting to vast expanse of sky and stars, 

all the “I’s”, some ancient and steady, some wild and wavering, some rescued and revived,

flesh and blood and spirit and spark.

They hail the coming of a new evolution, an aria of awakening. 

The only way to sing it is to learn the new words.