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Spiritual Sunday
Here’s a fine sonnet sonnet by Tyehimba Jess for tomorrow’s celebration of Juneteenth. (Thanks to the blog Art and Theology for alerting me to it.) The poem is part of a sonnet sequence known as a crown, in which the last line of each poem is the first line of the next one and so on in a circle. I recently shared a John Donne poem from his own crown sequence.
Apparently it took Jess eight years to write his sequence. It’s about the famous Fisk Jubilee singers, a group organized in 1871 to raise money for Fisk College that popularized the Negro spiritual tradition. As Jess makes clear, the music that came from “newly freed throats” was a music of freedom. The poem mentions how the music grew out of slavery, how it was birthed from “storied depths of American sin” and “scored from dawn to dusk with coffle and lash” (note the musical pun). But it also emphasizes the joy of freedom, with “each note bursting loose from human bondage.”
Punning off of Psalm 96 (“O sing unto the Lord a new song”), it opens, “O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song.”
The poem appears in Jess’s collection “Olio,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Fisk Jubilee Proclamation
(CHORAL)
By Tyehimba Jess
O sing unto the Lord a new song . . . (Psalm 96)
O, sing . . . undo the world with blued song
born from newly freed throats. Sprung loose from lungs
once bound within bonded skin. Scored from dawn
to dusk with coffle and lash. Every tongue
unfurled as the body’s flag. Every breath
conjured despite loss we’ve had. Bear witness
to the birthing of our hymn from storied depths
of America’s sin. Soul-worn psalms, blessed
in our blood through dark lessons of the past
struggling to be heard. Behold—the bold sound
we’ve found in ourselves that was hidden, cast
out of the garden of freedom. It’s loud
and unbeaten, then soft as a newborn’s face—
each note bursting loose from human bondage.