Lines on Notes on Lines

What disciplined care composers devote to their lines
when passion would scatter black and white notes from their lines!

Feet shuffle dusty roads in the dawn, drawn
by the swinging of chapel bells in their cotes, on their lines.

The words of the duet are tragic; love, loss and despair
but the singer's voices distill ecstasy, remote from their lines.

Wind keens in the bay, flute over rhythm section:
slap of waves and creak of rocking boats at their lines.

Invisible panpipes echo from rocky, untenanted hills.
No-one is there to dance but tethered goats on their lines.

Have you heard my people singing the old freedom songs
as they stood in the rain, waiting to vote, in their lines?

Perched on the glass insulators atop a telephone pole
a meadowlark spills music from his throat down the lines.

Old women at sunset, faces wrinkled as dried apples
hum soft ballads, the stories that life wrote in their lines.

Drunk on the lyrics of Hafiz and Yunus, I make
a song to praise God out of quotes from their lines.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside