Lorna Crozier: "A Summer's Singing"

Where does that singing start, you know,
that thin sound—almost pure light?
Not the birds at false dawn or their song
when morning comes, feathered throats
warm with meaning. A different kind of music.

Listen, it is somewhere near you.
In the heart, emptied of fear,
stubbornly in love
with itself at last, the old
desires a ruined chorus,
a radiant bloody choir.

Where does the singing start?
Here, where you are, there’s room
between your heartbeats,
as if everything you have ever been
begins, inside, to sing.


 

"A Summer's Singing" by Lorna Crozier, from Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart, 1995). © Lorna Crozier. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Her latest two books, both out this year, are The Wrong Cat and The Wild in You.

Art credit: "Saint-Tropez, Sunset," oil on canvas, painting by Henri Manguin (1904).