Sunday, May 23, 2010

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.


2 comments:

brian gerard said...

Great post! also, who gets credit for that terrific photograph?

Michael J. Bayly said...

Hi, Brian! Credit for the photo is given at the end of the post. It's by David Vance.

Peace,

Michael