Listen to the Music
By John Herlihy

I walked in shadow of trees as in a pond to wade,
The college campus was dressed in cooling shade.
All wrapped up inside the sanctuary of my head,
Without any thought to the outside world instead.
I heard nothing but a silence sounding like sound;
My morose thoughts like beached ships run aground.
The nighttime air can be as cold a steel shutters;
The daytime light seemed haunted in path-side gutters.
It was then that suddenly I felt like drifting, falling;
I saw nothing but heard a dove in the trees calling.

Music accompanies us, like tears accompany sorrow;
We seldom hear its sweetness, only loaned on borrow.
As if a door had opened with harmonies to fill the room,
To brush away our sour moodiness with a straw broom.
I close my eyes expecting darkness, but beholding light;
Stars in the sky at noon, like seeing them clearly at night.
Now inside my head, I have no desire to get myself out;
The music seems everywhere, as whispers not a shout.
Feeling warm inside, like a ripening apple or warm milk,
As though wrapped in mother’s blanket, made of soft silk.

Silence inside my head now filled with amazing sound;
Leaves rustled as whispers into my head from all around.
Harp music heard in the golden light from King David’s hand;
Sunlight seemed to dance to the tune of a marching band.
The world seemed all shiny like a stained glass window;
The rhythms of light dazzling in the colors of the rainbow.
Yellows, purples and greens under the sky’s infinite blue,
A cloak of many colors, or the creamy notes of boiling stew.
I see and hear the world unfiltered by shadows of my mind,
Like waking from a dream to see a dream of another kind.

The birds chirped their frantic happiness in random notes;
They dashed here and there overhead in their colored coats.
The bees in search of flowers pass a little too close to my ear,
Filling it with a buzz giving me the chills as they come near.
In some far distant corner of the remote sky I vaguely hear,
The murmur of thunder accompanied by a lightning spear.
The sedate grasses laid down as carpets singing and singing,
Imagine the force of the blades of grass winging and winging.
Finally, let us not forget the wind as it blows through the trees,
Whether whispering or howling, it seems to do so with ease.

Then there is the beating of my heart and its steady murmur;
Glass slippers alight across its surface with unrestrained fervor.
My heart seems suddenly filled to the brim with wild abandon;
Nature’s music reaches in my soul with notes seemingly random.
Music so rich and invigorating that on my own I can never afford;
Our celestial and earthly natures find harmony in mutual accord.
Was there ever a day in my life to have passed by without music?
Does the garden wish to be complete without the face of the tulip?
Listen to the flutter of wings, buzz of the hive, the call of the loon;
Mother Nature bows her head whenever she hears melodious tune.