Isaiah 26: 19 Poem by Whit Leyenberger

Awake and sing!
Sing you assembly of unsuspecting prophets
For air is liberation
And the night is not so long

Sing without language
let your voice scale unfamiliar ranges
No longer stifle your gasping arias of tragedy
for the benefit of those who sleep without dreams
Let your disappointment wring the air of vapor
Until it tears with laughter

sing me your hymns of lust
Give us that carnal noise that burrows within you
Craving release
That’s what we need to hear

Give us your messy trill of wrath
Your trembling joy
Your terrified arpeggios of hope
This is our forgotten language
lost beneath peeling skins of acclimated concession
We need no chatter of grinded teeth
We need to hear us again
In the molten languish of our origins

no matter how our voices rise
The stars will always be deaf to our whispering life
We are not the chosen ones. But,
You are not the product of your suppositions
You are not the sum of your faults and failures
You are not limited by what you can do,
but rather defined by what you wish to do
and so fail to perform

sing because to talk
is not enough to keep your sinking ships afloat
Sing in desperation my friends

Sing the song of loneliness
our shattering fugue of a million melodies
Just incapable of aligning in time

Sing to me, now and forevermore
For anything else is just playing for time
Incidental music

Sing because you need to be heard
Beyond lattice work words
for the wailing galaxy that lies between them
your unspoken catastrophe of inquenchable aspirations

we are not children of tepid water
and white-washed expectations
we are born of fury and confusion
charging headlong unquietly into this world

Sing because we are dying
And it is a glorious thing to be alive
Sing for forgiveness my friends

And God of we who live in dust
help us cast out our dead
give us the lungs of melody for our tongues
that marinade If not in truth than at least sincerity
The meek might inherit the earth
But it is the loud who fill the air