By the Rivers of Babylon

By the rivers of Babylon,

Where harps were hung upon the willows,

We sat and wept for Zion.

No melodies moved through water or wood,

For all was gone that once was good.

But the rivers of Babylon,

Their banks the bounds of where we stood

Like lambs before a lion,

Held mysteries, moonlight filling their flow

With dreams of Zion, new like snow.

By the rivers of Babylon,

The dawn found the bark of the willows bare.

The harps had gone, but melodies filled the air.

 

Earlier this week, I was finishing a read-through of the Psalms, and Psalm 137 stood out to me, because it began quite differently from most of the other psalms around it. Its first two verses were quite evocative, and they inspired me to start writing this poem. As I worked on it, though, I slowly realized that the poem also had parallels to the Easter story - items hanging on a tree, accompanied by despair, but with the promise of something new slowly forming as the items disappear from where they were hanging. I hadn't intended for the poem to become something related to Easter, but it happened anyway, perhaps by some mixture of subconscious thought and a little stroke of providence.

Psalm 137:1-2 (King James Version): "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof."