Flight Songs by Stacey C. Johnson

The music of Flight Songs is a collective singing through the aftermath of exile, into restoration, embodying communal grief and enduring hope of a vision in which the silenced, erased, displaced, and dispossessed voices of the moment––and throughout histories––reach a critical mass and corresponding volume vast and resonant enough to curve the long moral arc of the world in the direction of restoration. The speaker’s central invocation, to be “a bridge between relief and this emerging specter” parallels an offering of her spine as the “crossing from the land of none” to a place where courage stands as everlasting source. Here is a praise song for the living who “bake bread and hold the babies” and a walking meditation over the endlessly repeating way of sorrows, toward a vision for wading into the sanctifying moment of crossing from a time of destruction into a place of rebirth. Lamenting the erasure of histories “removed by the surgeons. . . [with] efficient needles to our lips,” here is a voice singing forward into territory “where another womb confronts us,” that its ancient beginnings may speak with a voice to lift the horror of the moment “from the ashes of our once and future wings” into resounding and perpetual chorus of new life, redeemed.