The Laying On of Hands
Tonight, in this chair
you bow your head
as if being crowned,
the tiara of my fingers
settling on your hair.
Let that hair forget
the other fingers that have
washed through it or
chastened it with snips
or combed and braided it.
Tonight, give your head
only to these hands,
praying it will ripen under them
and sow your hopes
in my mouth.
When my blessing ends,
like a road suddenly
overgrown with brush,
I will love you more than
before it opened, more than
its words can shoulder.
And you’ll raise your face
as the moon raises hers
in the winter sky where, tonight,
a cloud brushes the stars
on Virgo’s ancient head.
;
Composer, performer, scholar, and poet Michael Hicks received a DMA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and has been teaching at BYU since 1985. He is the author of four books-Mormonism and Music: A History (1989), Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (1999), Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2002), and The Street-Legal Version of Mormon’s Book (2012); the first three of these were published by University of Illinois Press, which in 2012 published his book co-authored with Christian Asplund, entitled Christian Wolff. His dozens of historical and analytical articles have appeared in books such as the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Mormonism as well as journals that include American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, and Perspectives of New Music. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley and has read papers at various national conferences (including UCLA’s multidisciplinary Conference on American Studies Connecting with Religion, 1991) and national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.
He has twice won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1994 and 2003) for his writing about music and a third time as editor of the journal American Music, a post he held from 2007-2010. His poetry, meanwhile, has been published in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Literature and Belief, Sunstone, and in the anthologies Cadence of Hooves (2008), New Poets of the American West (2010), and Fire in the Pasture (2011).
;
If you would like to submit your work to P&L, please see the P&L Submissions Guide.
;
This was delicious. Thank you