Rising – Hill, Poem For 2084
Edie Hill – Poem For 2084
Sunrise, Monday April 20
call your family and friends
It's 6.14 a.m. and the Sun is up two minutes earlier than yesterday. A week from now, the day will be over a quarter of an hour longer than today.
There is metaphor everywhere.
You who wake in human form,
healthy and vigorous,
above the root-shaped rocks,
take heart, evolutionary spirits,
many feared
you would never appear.
Monday!
Edie Hill's Poem for 2084 imagines our descendants waking to an Earth that is cleansed of our sins against it. As we listen to the woodpecker who arrived in our neighborhood two weeks ago (because: less humans, less noise), we are reminded of renewal.
Renewal: the essence of Joan Wolf Prefontaine's poem on which Edie's secular motet is based.
My breath has become water.
There are so many reasons we love to sing Poem for 2084. First, the message. Hope. With responsibility. Hope as a result of action. Then, there is Edie's extraordinary understanding of how contrapuntal voices can make indivisible musical fabrics out of highly individualized melodic lines; everyone has a wonderfully inventive part to sing, and we all love listening to how each individual part interacts with the others! And then, there is Edie. Not every artist's personality is reflected in their art. Edie is. There is a radiance and patience, kindness, a sense of the beautiful; and yet an understanding that to truly appreciate beauty, love, and hope, we have to know brutality, ugliness, and despair.
It's been another weekend of unbridled yelling and ugliness from those who hold the responsibility of leading us through dark times - through despair.
This is our response.
if the mind has grown
less separate from other minds,
rejoice
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Poem for 2084
music by Edie Hill
words by Joan Wolf Prefontaine
recorded live in concert at The Crossing @ Christmas
December 16, 2018 at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
video art by Dan Cole
* * *
My breath has become water.
Chokecherries and wild roses
grow from the ashes of my bones.
You who wake in human form,
healthy and vigorous,
above the root-shaped rocks,
take heart, evolutionary spirits,
many feared
you would never appear.
If the rivers and oceans
have begun to purify,
if the lead contaminated earth
has begun to heal,
if the mind has grown
less separate from other minds,
rejoice - call
your family and friends
to hear these words
of a dead poet:
gather rosehips for tea,
share bread with chokecherry jelly...