Well here we are at week 40 of #songaweek2016. I joined the second week, so this is my 39th weekly song. I set to music James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Gift to Sing,” that cheered me up in yet another week of feeling homesick (and fall gathering around me, bringing darker nights and mornings and more melancholy in general).

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,
And blackening clouds about me cling;
But, oh, I have a magic way
To turn the gloom to cheerful day –
I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,
Shadowed by Sorrow’s somber wing,
With glad defiance in my throat,
I pierce the darkness with a note,
And sing, and sing.

I brood not over the broken past,
Nor dread whatever time may bring;
No nights are dark, no days are long,
While in my heart there swells a song,
And I can sing.