Songs

Sometimes songs come from other places than church pews

and they are low and swallowed like wine

or they are loud and impenetrable like the way life should be,

and I think God is okay with that too.

I think the music is more than 

the recording studio where harmony and melody make love,

for I can hear it in the trees,

in the small unprecedented way that they shelter me from the rain,

and it is not only in split branches,

but in the sound of grain pouring out,

the slick sweat between bodies, 

the moss I scrape off the rocks,

there is music inside of smiles and laughter,

and children popping bubble wrap,

the juice running down a chin from a peach. 

I hear music without melodies,

songs without harmonies,

and they are everywhere 

and they are good. 

They are in the littered plastic bags dancing like ballerinas in the wind,

the knot of a wet shoelace tightened,

the late afternoon sleeper’s exhale, 

and I hear it in you,

in your breaths that pulse in and out like a butter-slab sun.

The world is the air rushing between the strings
and into the belly of a guitar that we call the universe,

and I think that God is okay that it isn’t always a hymn.

-anna sluder