Description

Voicing: SSAA choir and string quartet

Level: 4

Duration: 17 minutes

To see perusal score, please contact Jocelyn.

Click here to view the choral/piano reduction.

I. Let the Leaves Fall

II. Wrap Your Body in Darkness

III. Bury Me in White

IV. Swallow the Sun

How do we get through this? How do we deal with grief, loss, and sadness? These four movements with poetry by Julia Klatt Singer tackle this issue with beauty and clarity.

Text

I. Let the Leaves Fall

Sometimes we have to let them go, let the leaves fall.
Under bare limbs
we stand surrounded

by the beauty of everything we’ve lost.

II. Wrap Your Body in Darkness

Put on an old hat and mittens.
Wrap your body in darkness. Carry the weight of night on your shoulders.

Bare yourself
like these winter trees.

Let beauty fall to your feet, let wind shake you, let your bones swallow the chill of this evening’s air.

Nothing, not even winter, can tame

your wild bird of a heart.

III. Bury Me in White

The silence of snow, like the silence of you is what I wake to

blinding white and falling. Start the day

By throwing away words;
scarlet, indigo, then

cerulean, mango who needs them
in this kind of cold?

Bury me in white, bury me away like your heart.

IV. Swallow the Sun

A Secret. No frost today
on my window, no tumbling stars no forests of white, no birds
on the branch outside
no chance of one landing now stealing the morning with their song as I think about your hands
and how they make me feel
as beautiful as frost
as transparent as glass
as if I’ve swallowed
the sun.

~ Julia Klatt Singer