The Ears of Our Ears

I am sitting at the keyboard of my laptop as if it were a piano.  I improvise a few bars but they sound like yesterday's notes and the day before that. I want to say what I want to hear. Some mellifluous sound with a lift to induce flight. At least one foot, one wing. Let the other stay grounded.  Is that asking too much?

At the halfway point of my daily walk there is a garden of about two dozen birds of paradise plants. Half flower, half feathered. Blue beak, orange wing. It straddles two worlds; alien to both. I am seeking such a perch.

In my search for the transport that love offers I am carried away by my daughter Janice who has returned after decades away. She now lives with me in a reversal of parenting. I am both her father and in her charge. A little help here and there is welcomed. We care for each other though I know now when to back off. Janice is fiercely independent. The loves flows, back and forth, a music of our own making which she hears through her deaf ears. I have learned from her how to receive. I had almost forgotten. Her fingers fly on her video phone. Perhaps they are the bird-plant fluttering in the shadows. Though I am not fluent in her language I take joy in her joy. 

In fact, I never learned an instrument nor how to carry a tune. Perhaps in compensation, I’m told I have a listening heart. I don't hear America singing. I hear it goose-stepping.

Sometimes my words reach the level of lyric or lantern. Through the slang and slur of the day, the moral violence of deceit, it is hard to make words sing but it’s all I have. The page is funereally white. I write to leave my print. It’s me, Oh Lord. Where have you gone? This is no time to be taking a sabbatical.  

The psalm we need to see us through this dark passage hasn’t been written yet. It will be forged out of a tragically slow awakening. First the refiner’s fire. There will be a stirring in the ashes. What can we do to make music out of the dread?  Neither a hymn nor a dirge or a marching song. Music of a new morning. A lyric of dawn. Distant but approaching. Maybe with koto and flute or oboe and piano. Faintly familiar riffs with the ring of truth resonant to our bones. The ears of our ears will hear it.