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| Medieval Music for Plainsong |
"Plainsong for the End of Days"
was first published in
The Chariton Review
at Truman State University
in the Fall 2000 issue.
Plainsong for the End of Days
James Hart
The day labors and the song is long,
surely the strain contains too much
human music for time’s simple rounds
swelling tongueless moon’s muted chant,
each day’s chorus too full of light, dark,
and their devotions, fortune’s poles awry
in our working hands, mute antiphonies
whispered from fickle wisdom’s lips,
the pitch of holiness in the first pale
clef of stars above horizon’s staff,
each day’s chord of fragile clarity
too thinly liquid to hold our whole
human commotion, gravity heavier
than our native globe’s hold on us,
and so to ease its memory, time dies
to one merciful darkness and arises
newly born like the air’s beginning,
the old song written in notes of light
sung by stars and eloquent emptiness
before the first vesper choirs convened,
angels, birds, the choristers of clay
who think we sing holy songs erasing
harsh words and hatred’s phrases, though
our daily labors aspirate blacker prayers,
fire arising from our chapel throats,
each day’s glottal ashes in our mouths,
each dawn a new forgetfulness of how
to sing our devotion to songless stars,
and by our hands’ hapless music spoken
in stones or crucified on broken staves,
spoil, maim, or rend our supple spirits,
flay our holy days to veils of vellum,
dry them under hostile sky and press
imperfect parchments for our souls,
palimpsests bleeding black hosannas.
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