Sunday Music
Sunday Music
by Carol Bergé
In that hour when one could sleep
comes instead the murmur of Sunday
thick as syrup through a window
with a bright stillness behind it
its own music of late afternoon.
And the vision of how a town looks
from ten thousand feet above it
through clouds, as it lies carved
alongside the braided railroads
near the delta and black farmland
covered with pines like fur. Now
is the same vision I once formed
of my life and of your own: a space
and soft sound, here and then gone
a chain of murmuring Sundays, not
vast but set in a universal silence.
And we will be remembered, then.
A heard quality of waking dreams…
A lovely, well-crafted lyric creating its own “waking dream” of sentences nudging one another into universality, all drawn from a deeply imbued sense of place. The syntax is remarkable in its ability to communicate without much punctuation, whose use though is quietly edifying. The line “And we will be remembered, then.” touches us deeply.
This describes a feeling I know really well, but have never been able to write.