Keeping the Faith: A Poem to Take Along for the Ride
Poetry and the lost art of singing together
By Bob Jones
A long time ago, I became captivated by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats through his magnificent poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” It begins “That is no country for old men,” and in regular rhymed lines that don’t seem rhymed, tells of this fellow who gets on a boat, leaves the world of “whatever is begotten, born, and dies,” and sails toward “the artifice of eternity” where his soul can learn to sing.
Over the decades, I’ve rested in poems that capture me by the sound and sense by which they live. A particular recent poem is a case in point. Ada Limon’s “Hell or High Water” took hold of me as I was reading it in The New Yorker for Nov. 13, 2023, and has stayed with me ever since.
Limon just completed three years as Poet Laureate of the United States and has a poem of hers engraved on the spaceship Europa heading for Jupiter. She recently returned to Sonoma, her hometown. She’s there to give a reading at Readers Books, where she once worked and to spend some time unwinding after her tenure in Washington D.C. Among her accomplishments as Poet Laureate, she established “You are here: Poetry in the Parks,” by which visitors are invited to write down their experience of the natural wonders around them.
Her poem, “Hell or High Water,” begins with this frank declaration: “Not churchgoers or joiners, still my people sang….” It gives instance after instance of the family singing on car trips “up Highway 12 or Arnold Drive,” driving “up from Glen Ellen,” and other California highways and byways. They sang the likes of “Blue Moon,” “500 Miles,” Mexican favorites, and as night fell, sad songs, “the aspen and the pines all flickering in the distance.”
About midway through, the poem raises the intriguing question “What / was the difference between a song sung on / the journey and a song sung once you got there….” And the answer comes quickly, “one was about passing the time, the other about / bellowing your presence to the rocks and stones.”
Before the poem ends, we have the family gathered around Limon’s dying stepmother. Her father, in his strong voice and accompanying himself on the guitar, is singing “500 Miles” to his wife in her final moments. And so, the poet tells us, when the hospice nurse said, “You / have no religion, right?” Limon “didn’t know how to answer, / because we did, it was this, it was all those years / tied together on the road singing / singing at the top of our lungs….”
That gets me. It pulls me in, for I know full well that people singing together, in church, out of church, anywhere, is powerful and affirming, like faith can be, like sorrows being lifted, like a healing stream splashing down from the mountains. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it many times. I know this is so the way I know the wind is blowing when it gusts against my face. I’ve been there, done that.
It saddens me that at ball games and other times when we used to rise and sing our national anthem together, we now pay someone to sing it to us. We miss out on something important, I feel.
In singing together we transcend ourselves. We rise above our troubles. We can feel in our breath and bones how we’re not alone. We should do it more. All choirs are Love Choirs, and blessings upon the wonderful Sebastopol group that goes by that name.
Limon’s poem bears witness to the downhome goodness of singing songs together. It is a human truth that is also a truth in many faith traditions. We do well to sing “at the top of our lungs” along with others singing at the top of their lungs as we travel the sometimes-bumpy road of life.
And for those who need to be captured by a poem from time to time, Larry Robinson, former Mayor of Sebastopol and now host of that traveling celebration of poetry, Rumi’s Caravan, will send you a poem by one or another fine poet every day if you send him your email address. If you’d like to sign up for the Poem for the Day email list, write Larry Robinson at Lrobpoet@sonic.net and request to be put on the list.
Further, I plan to be at the concert by Virginia Harrison, Jennel Parr, and John Simon, three members of the late Sonia Tubridy’s River Choir. They sing today, Saturday, Sept. 27, at 2:30 pm at First Congregational Church, 2000 Humboldt St., Santa Rosa, and I’m happy to pay the suggested donation of $15 at the door.
You can listen to “Hell or High Water” by Ada Limon here.
Bob Jones, who is 91, has written his column, “Keeping the Faith,” for local weeklies in west county for more than 50 years. He was pastor of the Guerneville and Monte Rio Community Churches for 20 years, living in Guerneville since 1966.
Thank you for providing the opportunity to pause, reflect and remember the significance of singing, in our family. Be it lullabies, folk songs, soothing songs at bedtime, , songs that my mother sang to me as a child which I then sang to my daughter which she then sang to my granddaughter, singing was a definitive way to say"I love you". Many of our fondest family memories are centered around music and singing together. Remembering Jon Denver, Jim Croce, Peter Paul and Mary, Free to Be along with various folk singers, brings to mind the special experience of traveling and singing, all of us connected through the lyrics and the rhythms.
Thank you