Program Notes
I structured this song cycle in three sets of pairs. The first two songs are characterized by contemplation, thoughtfulness, and wistfulness. The middle two are energetic and intense, with a bit of playfulness and humor. The third pair is introspective, poignant, and sorrowful, drawing on themes of loss and death.
In lieu of further musical or textual analysis, I will simply add that Suzanne Underwood Rhode’s poetry resonated with me immediately. Birds, of course, have captivated writers and composers throughout history, not only for their natural musical skills and vibrant visual beauty, but also for their grace and freedom. But subject matter alone is not what captivated me. These poems are gems, mined and polished then finely crafted into personal & precious objects whose meaning & secrets only the reader knows.
I. White Music at Dusk
An egret preens in a tree back- lighted by the pendant sun slipping to gild each strand
and you catch it all on film: the royal bird, the branch, before the world goes dark.
We ride our bikes home past the grave, blank sea, past years when I never knew how to picture my life.
But here the pine-strewn path in lowlight returns the day’s honey to my mind: gold in the branches, the rinsed air, the thought of you holding my face as your brightest world.
II. Gray Distances
The loneliness of their long whistles, the sound full of their whiteness, even in community they are lonely, miles of loneliness across the rain- beaten water as they have come to overwinter, to fly the gray distances from there to here, to be the wings of longing, to plumb the sky and sea, landing and leaving like arrows from the bow of God, the air crying for love of swans.
III. Peacock Lost in Tornado
When the great wind took aim at the Harper’s farm, it swallowed only Peabody.
The barn was damaged, implements twisted, but not a hair on a head was lost, only Peabody’s feathers.
Later that day, a rainbow.
IV. Warlord
Creature scarcely bumblebee size launches from God’s own finger. Fierce among flowers, he’s a Samurai fending off rivals brazen to venture near his private nectar sipped from bee balm’s lips, those scarlet beauties shielded by mighty wingbeats driven by his furious heart.
V. Missing Persons
The finch’s nest sprang up one secret day in May in my unguarded wreath.
I dared not disturb it, a living story embedded in my heart whose guidance was, don’t come close, check the mail some other way.
No one, not me nor you, (had you been here), was allowed passage through the door with its window letting me glimpse the play of shadows and the hatchlings dimly shifting, their beaks crying with hunger going back to the beginning of every child’s mother laboring to nourish the trembling body under her wings.
After weeks, the finches fledged. All but one I found when I took down the wreath, a sad little rag whose death was known by the glare of day who might, says my heart, be alive in the air where you are.
VI. Birds at Night
Birds have their own nightfall, a darkness not from here. They slip into their wings and quell the air.
Soon the warbling stops, the fences disappear, morning glories too, the world keeps there.
© Suzanne Underwood Rhodes. Reprinted with permission from the author.