Hymn Sing

Hymn Sing

My parents’ voices

harmonized downstairs after they got us kids to bed

and their voices blended,

filling the room like wood-stove heat.

On after supper pretty-drives

we’d sing all five verses of Then sings my soul

and What a friend we have in Jesus.

I remember, especially, the night

my father didn’t come home.

The worried aunts and kindly neighbors

took turns at the piano:

Great is thy faithfulness.

Farther along we’ll understand why.

And those verses,

written in the 1800’s, helped a five-year-old girl

sleep that night, and the two after,

before he phoned,

lost in what they used to call

a nervous breakdown.

Most of all, it was the night

my cousins and I sang to my dying mother:

she in a morphined haze—

on her way to where she would soon be going.

We sang, still comforted by familiar words:

And he walks with me and he tells me I am his own.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” she mumbled from somewhere deep,

then perfectly, though softly, harmonized a line.

They are not words and verses to me, the old hymns:

they are the blessed assurance of all who came before me.

I do not hear songs when I sing them: I hear the voices

of those I have loved most on this earth.

Kate Young Wilder