The Song of the Lark, by Susan Signe Morrison

Song of the Lark, by Jules Adolphe Breton (France) 1884

The Song of the Lark

She stands
between sky and earth,
implanted in the solidness of the ground
which cannot betray her step.
The earth is firm, solid, stable.
It responds predictably to her care,
varying only according to
the vagaries of weather, crop disease, insects,
and wind.
 
The slightest of breezes causes her to pause.
She looks up,
and hears that piercing tune,
ecstatic requiem,
achingly sweet.
Sick for home,
her sad heart pains,
with delight and melancholy and sehnsucht and yearning
to capture that bird,
cage it,
and hear it always.
 
But enclosed,
its plaintive anthem would fade.
Safe and shut off,
that wild beauty tamed
would lose its immortality.
 
Only free,
uncircumscribed from human confines,
can that voice be uttered
because it cannot be captured 
because it is ephemeral
because the memory of it 
is eternal
like the field she stands rooted in.
 
She -- grounded in the earth,
attuned to heaven --
seems more real, more substantial
than I.
Am I just a dream, 
a trick of the light
you see out of the corner of your eye?
A floater which sometimes crosses your vision
forcing you to perceive it until
it breaks up and, dissolving, enters your body?
 
Could I be like her?
Let me stay grounded.
Ground me.
Or else that piercing voice, 
opening magic casements,
will cause me to rise,
levitate,
into the air.
Can you hear it—that song?
Do you sense it—my voice?
Are you pulling me back to earth?
Or are you floating up 
with me?
 
Susan Signe Morrison

Read Susan's essay on Ernst Barlach's sculpture here. 

Writing on topics lurking in the margins of history, novelist and medievalist Susan Signe Morrison is University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University. She has published poetry in Mothering, Presence, The Ekphrastic Review, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), and Taj Mahal Review.