Ode to Joy

I hear the Ninth Symphony
and maybe it’s an old album cover
I see as I close my eyes:

light on towering cumulus
paints the colors ‘bruise’ and ‘honey’
onto sculpted vapor
evincing atmospheric violence.

And there in the fourth movement,

that anthemic melody come before the voices,
voices that sing, finally, so mercifully,
while ecstatic, unintelligible.

O, God forbid that they should sing
in a language I understand!

I read somewhere Beethoven
included the chorale as afterthought.

Schiller’s poem struck me as insipid
when I first read the translation.

Tonight will be about finding
that silver shape of the wind!