Or the right to speak about contentment—much less
rejoicing—when the voices are already muttering
Are you kidding?! What (non-burning) planet
are you from? “Happy”! Don’t you just mean “Privileged”?
And they’re right, they’re right, even if we ourselves

are not the grifters, the shirkers, the malevolent,
nonetheless here we are, our shared and shameful history
stitched into us all, and it’s too feeble to apologize, too
late to philosophize, and I’m already stepping back
when—there—I stumble on beauty, which Stendhal called

the promise of happiness,
and maybe no one has a right to beauty either,
but are we duty-bound to refuse it? Grace
Bumbry is singing, and while her silken notes
can’t and never should erase what she endured, they rise,

and rising they keep faith with a force that will not
permit itself to be bound, something as common
as the air her voice is made of and more precious,
diamond-dazzling. And whenever we hear it—yes,
even now, with the grim landscape of our iniquity

lying dark as ever around us—shouldn’t that voice,
kindling air into flame, melting rust into honey, dive
down and draw our hearts into our throats,
so that simply breathing our own lungfuls
of rage and praise and thanks and mourning,
we sing too?