Listening to peepers and birds not-quite-ready to let go of the day, I breathe in the soft scent of lilacs and crab apple blossoms as night settles into every nook and cranny of these hills. Spring is such a gentle season, and yet so powerful – tender shoots thrusting themselves through packed soil. Every year the same. A million tiny miracles.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite Easter anthems – one that always seemed more grounded and sober than all the joyous hallelujahs that are ubiquitous at that time of year.  It’s the kind of Easter anthem one might sing in Cong Abbey … just sayin’!

The hallelujahs generally left me uninspired and a little out-of-sorts, honestly.  But this one song, sung slowly and in a minor key, I really liked.

It begins:

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
love lives again, that with the dead has been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

It goes on, with more traditional religiosity than I believe readers of JordanCornblog are generally up for, so I’ll forego the rest of the lyrics. The main draw for me was that each stanza ended with “love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.”

I really liked that – a kind of hopefulness that was small enough to be possible. Not pie in the sky, but something I could wrap my head around.

And just like clockwork, again, this spring, the green blade riseth.  I like that!

Here’s a modernized version of the song – sounds different from the one I remember, but pretty close.