Strange Tongues

By Marjorie Dobson

I cannot read music.
Those lines and dots
and strangely curving symbols
are merely patterns
filling up a page.

I cannot play music.
Black and white keyboards,
stringed instruments
and tubes of wood and brass,
are dead in my hands,
silent to my lips.

I cannot sing music -
not with any confidence.
My lips frame words.
My voice sounds tuneless
to my own ears
and I am wary
of letting others hear
my faltering efforts.

Music is a foreign language to me
and I am as incompetent in that
as I am in other tongues.

Yet music moves my soul
and I listen and am carried
by its haunting power
into a world, alive and beautiful,
and the music speaks
in a voice all its own.

The Spirit's language
is a foreign tongue,
not understood.
And yet it speaks,
controls and liberates
and moves
into the deepest areas of my soul
to make a moving music
of its own.


(From Eternal Springs: An Anthology of Hope, compiled by Geoffrey Duncan, Canterbury Press, 2006)


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Pentecost
In the Vigor of the Spirit
The Spirit and the Faithful

Image: David Vance.