There on the poplars we hung our harps … - Psalm 137:2

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 14, 2017): Psalm 137

Don McLean has long stayed out of the interpretation game when it comes to his classic hit “American Pie.” While other have found the seed of many post-World War II events hidden within the words of the song, McLean has maintained his dignified silence with what his creation might have meant as he penned the lyrics. It is rumored that when McLean was one asked what the song meant, McLean’s response was “American Pie means that I never have to work again unless I want to.” However, the folk singer has admitted that in writing the song he has exorcised some of the grief that he felt on “the day the music died,” – the February 3, 1959, plane crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. For Don Mclean, the day the music died was the next day, February 4 as the thirteen-year-old McLean attempted to make his rounds delivering the very papers that were telling the story of the plane crash. In the song, the experience is conveyed with the line “February made me shiver with every paper I’d deliver.” McLean dedicated the album “American Pie” to Buddy Holly as an act of remembering the influence that Holly gave to music during his short life (Holly was just 22 on “the day the music died”).

For those of born after “the day the music died,” the song gives us the opportunity to relive the impact that February 3, 1959, had on the world. Through the poetry of McLean, we are given a chance to experience the day that the world learned of the death of the musicians. We didn’t get to experience it first hand, but we get to experience the event through the eyes of Don McLean and the beauty of his poetry.

Psalm 137 offers us a similar experience. The Psalmist describes the utter desolation of what it meant to be torn from your home and forced to move to a foreign land, and it does it with a poetical power that allows us to experience the despair of the ones who were there. We get to weep with these immigrants who wept over 2500 years ago; we feel their emotion and taste their tears.

The NIV translates the word “`arab” as “poplar,” but other translations opt for “willow.” Both are appropriate, the term could equally apply to either, but willow might be the more poetic translation of the word. Willow paints a word picture of a tree that weeps along with the musicians who have gathered underneath it drooping limbs. The musicians hang their instruments on the tree with no intention of playing music. Maybe the wind through the branches of the willow tree could produce a moaning tune that was more appropriate for this place beside the rivers of Babylon than anything that the displaced musicians could try to create. In the days before, their music had filled the temple, but now there was no room for music in their lives. Not here by the rivers of Babylon; not now, after the day that the music had died.   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 50