It is nearly imperceptible, the whisper of the girls. You can almost convince yourself it’s merely the wind, a figment of your imagination, the breeze through chittering corpses of last season’s bamboo.

But then you hear the words.

It is a melody. You can feel it in your bones, this song of tears on shallow graves, of bones peeking out through springtime earth, of unmarked patches of land in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It is a hymn. The holiest of songs, raised to the heavens with voices that never made it there, sung on vocal chords stretched thin like ligaments after one too many days carrying the weight of babies, the heft of toddlers, of children grown and buried and forgotten.

It is a prayer. Fervent and desperate, like panted breaths under moonlight, bruises painted along throats, whispered fights in cars at the curb. It is as warm as the room with grandmothers, mothers, and daughters becoming mothers in one gasping pain that rips two lives apart, making whole and making new, always making making making.

It is a psalm. You will find it in no prayer book. No onion skin pages can hold it, no pocket bible can contain it. It is scrawled on notes passed between sweaty palms, hidden under tables and pressed in books like so many dead flowers.

It is the evensong. Hummed and wished and cursed and sworn beneath every roof, every sky, every sweltering summer sun and frigid winter star. Wrung out with a million hands, gnarled with age, young and pale, callused with the weight of years of work, bedecked with jewels, and studded with freckled, every one of them raising you up and pushing you forward, along a path that no one has walked before.

It is a wish that things will get better.

It is a promise that they will.

It is a song.

Do you hear it?

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