We, who are in silence, having forgotten the song…

There is so much,
so many of these
hymns left over from
other days,

so many yellowed
pages, rolled at the
edge and smudged
from generations
of moist hands,

but the one song
that doesn’t come
complete, the
mysterious one
with the missing
fifth verse—

that is the one we
pine to call out,
our voices not
so well cultured
as they once were,
our tones moving
just outside the
key,

but still, there would
be a marvel in it,
something better
than the well-produced
known,

for these canticles would
be sacred unto us,
gold brought back
from places further than
sunken ships,

and the spin of those
long lost words would
be on everything,
all the world’s axis
flung differently down
paths previously unflown
in space,

if only for those lost words
of the nameless singer,
that single missing
page to an otherwise
exhaustive treatment
of the age…

And ignoring those
chiding voices of our
mothers, now long unknown
and unheard-of, we
pick at the scabs of
our generational wounds,
we pull at the dropped
stitch in the fabric
of things that are
otherwise good,

for all the stanzas and
verses seem as nothing
if the single phrase we
wish to hear most is
forever mute and
forgotten.