‘The singing will never be done:’
I hear the karanga: in New Zealand, women lead a song of welcome to the dead when the bodies of the fallen are brought home, preparing a sound gate through which the warriors pass into the marae, the communal sacred home that houses the umbilical cords of the tribe. The singer’s ululation is accompanied by the vibrating of her hand, held stiffly at her side: in the Haka, Maori dance, the gesture points to the flicker of sunlight on the water, passed by in the ancestral canoe, as islanders sped towards Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud. The dead come to rest in the sound of water, in the unbounded sunlight, in the no-where of shadow and flicker. Sound reaches out, draws near, disperses and undoes the bounds: human voices unleash power, weaving lives into the fabric of patterns that keep past, present and future connected and traversed.
‘And beauty came like the setting sun:’ Fire is on the water, or on the long dunes of fields undulating like ocean waves in the low countries of Europe’s Great War. Sleep overcomes the horror, and yet …. That sun which is so far away from the cold marshes, both tears and soothes the listener whose ear is attuned to sounds not of this world. Ears shattered by explosions, tinnitus the constant companion of many soldier-poets, that burst of song and birds and suns shape-shifts from a hidden Hades to the golden chariot of a sun’s orbital traverse. There’s an order to the day’s end, at last, an inevitability and unfolding that the false suns of bombs do not allow. The light drifts away, a day’s light, a life’s light, and the future emerges in one last line, in the ongoing labor of a remembering that ‘will never be done:’ held, sung, reaching, connected forever by the intimacy of sound.
‘O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing
will never be done.’
Osiris, the bird-god scattered and reassembled, the doves of the Trinity’s Spirit, owls as harbingers of death, the whip-poor-will as the escaping soul of the New World, old European tales of birds guiding dead souls: every one was a bird, and death lifts towards a different horizon, a different sound, and a wave travels across the land.
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