Marcia F. Brown is the author of five books of poetry and the essay collection “Well Read, Well Fed: A Year of Great Reads and Simple Dishes for Book Groups.” Brown served as poet laureate for the city of Portland where she edited the anthology “Port City Poems: Contemporary Poets Celebrate Portland, Maine.” Brown lives in Yarmouth, where she cohosts the monthly Local Buzz Reading Series at The Yarmouth History Center.

Hallelujah

It is a midsummer evening in Maine. Dark
  will not come for some time.
We are three generations, gathered as families do
in summer. The boys have brought guitars,
have learned to play Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah
  especially for you who love to join them
in the chorus — your beautiful baritone.
  Then we are all singing — Hallelujahs
rising through late sun into the open
  arms of trees, under the wings of swifts.

Ten years later you are gone. The television
  lights up Andrea Bocelli singing Hallelujah
in a Tuscan courtyard flooded gold with sun
  and I hear not Bocelli’s soulful tenor,
but only you and am undone.
  Unmoored on tides of love
and loss, I have no say in this.
  The music does not ask permission.

If we are tethered to that netherworld
  of those who go before us, then surely this —
these notes, chords, melodies, and silences —
  ligaments of music itself, must be that tether.
I know of nothing else so deft, so suddenly
  able to gather us up
 and lead us back — intact, unaged, unchanged —
  to those we love, to that irrecoverable
life spent with them,
  if we can bear to go.

— Marcia F. Brown

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Hallelujah,” copyright 2025 by Marcia F. Brown, appears by permission of the author.