2025 . for SATB choir . c. 4’15 .
This piece is adapted from the poem Sun-Up by Lola Ridge. The poem, written from the perspective of a four-year-old girl in early twentieth-century America, is a meditation on gnosis and cruelty through the eyes of adolescence. I cried when I first read it. I was transported back to my own childhood, when there was so much I didn’t know, and yet in some ways I had a clearer perspective of life and of truth than I do now. I wanted the material of this piece to evoke feelings of loneliness, awe, and childlike simplicity all at once. The girl stares out her window at night and speaks to the universe as a great and awful friend.
Text
Fragments from Sun-Up by Lola Ridge (1920)
Moon is shining strangely
on the white palings of the fence.
Fence keeps very still…
most times it moves a little…
everything moves a little
though you mayn’t know it…
It’s strange about stars….
You have to be still when they look at you.
Their long silvery rays
sink into you and do not hurt.
Moon is shining strangely
on the white palings of the fence.
Fence keeps very still…
I am shining too
but my light is shut inside of me
and I can’t get it out.
Recorded by The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally .
LUCY SHIRLEY 