Secular

Choral score

$6.50 for one copy of the cycle (you are buying a digital license)

I. I am at Home
II. New Roof
III. Good Bones
IV. A Place
V. Together on the Porch

Note:

Writing a piece about home is not a terribly unique venture, but it is one that is so rich and has inspired many poets and composers. This is no surprise, for everyone remembers and celebrates the place where they belong. To me, “At Home” strays from some of the normal tropes of youth, ancestry, and birth home memories and instead moves toward the home we create as adults.

- Timothy C. Takach

Text:

I. I am at Home
I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

- Wendell Berry (Copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.)


II. New Roof
On the housetop, the floor of the boundless
where birds and storms fly and disappear,
and the valley opened over our heads, a leap
of clarity between the hills, we bent five days
in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on
the new, letting the sun touch for once
in fifty years the dusky rafters, and then
securing the house again in its shelter and shade.
Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history
has come between me and the sky.

- Wendell Berry (Copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.)


III. Good Bones
From the road, all tucked-in and tidy
Between the hydrangeas
and the twilight sky.

You’ve always like the old ones best
For their charm, their good bones.

Gravity has a way of dropping
Everything under the dresser
Into the corner

Can’t lose your marbles
If you know
(More or less) where they’ve gone.

Remember the first place we lived?
How there was room for the piano
If we left it in the hallway?

Remember the winter nights?
How we laid awake waiting  
For the pipes to burst?

We turn up the lights (the bulb’s burned out)
Add another coat of paint.
How many times have you tapped this nail
Back into place?

Each wall tells a story.
Each floor sings the mockingbird’s song.
Light the candles, dim the lights,
we’ll change the bulb another day.

You are wise, appreciate
what was once straight
now softly curves.

Still standing.
Good bones.

- Julia Klatt Singer (Commissioned poem. Used with permission.)

IV. A Place
There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

- Wendell Berry (Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.)


V. Together on the Porch
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak.
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.

- Wendell Berry (Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.)