The Stone Harp (2017/20)
for vocal quartet and piano. 9'
Commissioned and premiered in 2017 by the Uncommon Music Festival, Sitka, Alaska. Revised in 2020 and performed again in Sitka at the 2022 Uncommon Music Festival.
When I consider my upbringing in Homer, Alaska in light of the sesquicentennial (150th) year of the transfer of Russian America to the U.S. (always a mouthful), it feels ridiculous to focus on any one person’s or group’s supposed claim to the land. To write about my private relationship to the sea, the mountains, the seasons, or the animals reveals nothing to anyone else. It seems futile to explicitly join the voices of Alaska Natives, Russian missionaries and fur traders, Western gold miners, fisherman, and American colonists into a false paean; worse, it is utterly the wrong place to redress colonial sins.
But Alaska poet laureate John Meade Haines always seems to grasp the totality of the land—scary, sad, arresting, and ecstatic—, the many reasons that people come, and its abiding power over all of us.
Part 1. The Stone Harp
A road deepening in the north,
strung with steel,
resonant in the winter evening,
as though the earth were a harp
soon to be struck.
As if a spade
rang in a rock chamber:
in the subterranean light,
glittering with mica,
a figure like a tree turning to stone
stands on its charred roots
and tries to sing.
Now there is all this blood
flowing into the west,
ragged holes at the waterline of the sun—
that ship is sinking.
And the only poet is the wind,
a drifter
who walked in from the coast
with empty pockets.
He stands on the road
at evening, making a sound
like a stone harp
strummed
by a handful of leaves…
Part 2. To Live Among Children
[…] to live among children
the voices demanding or gentle
asked to be told once more a story […]
and think of the answers we give:
why the continents drift
what wind carves the rock into cities
or blows the people on their polar journeys
what legendary shoulder continues
to hold up the sky
or why the mountain train
never seems to end
all of our history come to that moment
when we look at a shadow flying past
what bird, what beast
was that?
to live among children
the voices demanding or gentle
asked to be told once more a story
repeated by the shadows
and what had those shadows to say,
vague and nodding
dense with a mystery
always towering in the distance?