Secular

vocal/piano score

About:

I love that this poem doesn’t give you all the information right away. Rash introduces his characters and their backstories like a good storyteller, and our understanding of them changes every time we glean more information. The narrative of the art song changes as well, shifts moods and colors as the main character tells us more nad more and as his emotions run higher. Yet that soft, pastoral triple meter of the prairie is always present, keeping us tied to the land, always under the storyteller’s spell.

– Timothy C. Takach

Text:

The hay was belt buckle high
when rain let up, three days’ sun
baked stalks dry, and by midday
all but the far pasture mowed,
raked into windrows, above
June’s sky still blue as I drove
my tractor up on the ridge
to the far pasture where strands
of sagging barbed wire marked where
my land stops, church land began,
knowing I’d find some grave-gift,
flowers, flag, styrofoam cross
blown on my land, and so first
walked the boundary, make sure what
belonged on the other side
got returned, soon enough saw
black-eyed susans, the same kind
growing in my yard, a note
tight-folded tied to a bow.
Always was all that it said,
which said enough for I knew
what grave that note belongs to.
I knew as well who wrote it,
she and him married three months
when he died, now always young,
always their love in first bloom,
too new to life to know life
was no honeymoon. Instead,
she learned that lesson with me
over three decades, what fires
our flesh set early on cooled
by time and just surviving,
and learned why old folks called it
getting hitched, because like mules
so much of life was one long row
you never saw the end of,
and always he was close by,
under a stone you could see
from the porch, wedding picture
she kept hid in her drawer,
his black-and-white flashbulb grin
grinning at me like he knew
he’d made me more of a ghost
to her than he’d ever be.
There at that moment – that word
in my hand, his grave so close,
if I’d had a shovel near
I’d have dug him up right then,
hung his bones up on the fence
like a varmint, made her see
what the real was, for memory
is always the easiest
thing to love, to keep alive
in the heart. After a while
I laid the note and bouquet
where they belonged, never spoke
a word about it to her
then or ever, even when
she was dying, calling his
name with her last words. Sometimes
on a Sunday afternoon
I’ll cross the pasture, make sure
her stone’s not starting to lean,
if it’s early summer bring
black-eyed susans for her grave,
leave a few on his as well,
for soon enough we’ll all be
sleeping together, beyond
all things that ever mattered.

– “Black-Eyed Susans” from the collection Raising the Dead by Ron Rash (Minneapolis: Iris Press, 2002). Copyright © 2015 by Ron Rash. Reprinted with permission.