Sunday in the Islands

A rooster crowed – the villagers in their black dresses

and tata, their black suits, white white shirts,

the flower of their devotion. A pig ambled in the rain.

Then they began to open their mouths

to listen and find one another,

they began to fill up the mystery,

to waken our souls.

This blending of human voices,

low and high and humming, and lifting.

They sang themselves out of themselves.

They summoned their dead from under garlanded mounds,

the bright sails of their embroidered names.

They sang them out of the depths of their ocean –

from their watery wrecks.

They sang for our brief moment here,

offered up this,

this shattering blue cathedral of song.

Richard Langston

Richard Langston is the author of 5  books of poetry: Boy (2003); Henry, Come See the Blue (2005); The Newspaper Poems (2007); The Trouble Lamp (2009); Things Lay in Pieces (2012). All published by FitzBeck. He works as a director for Country Calendar.