Sunday morning with the Sensational Nightingles

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Billy Collins

Sunday morning with the Sensational Nightingales

   It was not the Five Mississippi Blind Boys
   who lifted me off the ground
   that Sunday morning
   as I drove down for the paper, some oranges, and
   bread.
   Nor was it the Dixie Hummingbirds
   or the Soul Stirrers, despite their quickening name
   or even the Swan Silvertones
   who inspired me to look over the commotion of
   trees
   into the open vault of the sky.

   No, it was the Sensational Nightingales
   who happened to be singing on the gospel
   station early that Sunday morning
   and must be credited with the bumping up
   of my spirit, the arousal of the mice within.

   I have always loved this harmony,
   like four, sometimes five trains running
   side by side over a contoured landscape--
   make that a shimmering, red-dirt landscape,
   wildflowers growing along the silver tracks,
   lace tablecloths covering the hills,
   the men and women in white shirts and dresses
   walking in the direction of a tall steeple.
   Sunday morning in a perfect Georgia.

   But I am not here to describe the sound
   of the falsetto whine, sepulchral bass,
   alto and tenor fitted snugly in between;
   only to witness my own minor ascension
   that morning as they sang, so parallel,
   about the usual themes,
   the garden of suffering,
   the beads of blood on the forehead,
   the stone before the hillside tomb,
   and the ancient rolling waters
   we would all have to cross some day.

   God bless the Sensational Nightingales,
   I thought as I turned up the volume,
   God bless their families and their powder blue suits.
   They are a far cry from the quiet kneeling
   I was raised with,
   a far, hand-clapping cry from the candles
   that glowed in the alcoves
   and the fixed eyes of saints staring down
   from their corners.

   Oh, my cap was on straight that Sunday morning
   And I was fine keeping the car on the road.
   No one would ever have guessed
   I was being lifted into the air by nightingales,
   hoisted by their beaks like a long banner
   that curls across an empty blue sky,
   caught up in the annunciation
   of these high, most encouraging tidings.

BILLY COLLINS, professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, says he was completely surprised when he was appointed U.S. poet laureate. Not many of Collins's poems are specifically religious or about religious topics unless the wonder, mystery, irony, tragedy, silliness and beauty of human life and experience constitute religious topics--and I, of course, think they do. I can almost hear the Sensational Nightingales on a perfect Sunday morning. And I know what it is like when the mystery of life suddenly and strongly permeates my consciousness and I too turn up the volume--caught up in the annunciation of "these high, most encouraging tidings."

--John M. Buchanan, editor/publisher