Listening to Tippett twice
A child of our time (1944)
In South Kensington now
I’m early at the table
wait patiently with a beer
then rise with a kiss to greet her
and my day has been real
in the absence of dreams
so ordinary real
to include the buying of bread
then making a few calls
coffee and the newspaper’s
anger and grief
and time always fixing times
and now a wash of notes
tentatively rising
from the well of the hall
though it’s hard to give them
the attention they ask
with these nervous coughs
firing off like gunshots
but as muted trumpets
stir the choir to its feet
I’m gone a thousand miles
I’ve gone twenty years
into the sunlight
of a baked-brown hillside
near Assisi I remember
as a sloping orchard
close to the end of summer
at the mouth of a tent
I gaze at sweltering heat
alone but thinking of her
across the Alps
across the Channel
my earphones growling
with these same notes--
I’ve no money for my bread
I’ve no gift for my love
the tenor’s plight rolls
on the spool of tape
running steadily down
like a little clock of longing
though within a week
I’ll have re-crossed Europe
to fall into her arms
set foot on the path
to where this tenor’s lament
asks the same redemption
of two hundred voices
weepingly as one
these voices concluding
at last with silence
that pause of reluctance
as we pick up the threads
of the evening--realise
what our hands are for
moving to defer words
unless it is in this way
we try to repeat the gift
of the dreamwork
of the singers against
the dreamwork of the past
to fling it forward
against anger and grief
against the coming need
A child of our time (1944)
In South Kensington now
I’m early at the table
wait patiently with a beer
then rise with a kiss to greet her
and my day has been real
in the absence of dreams
so ordinary real
to include the buying of bread
then making a few calls
coffee and the newspaper’s
anger and grief
and time always fixing times
and now a wash of notes
tentatively rising
from the well of the hall
though it’s hard to give them
the attention they ask
with these nervous coughs
firing off like gunshots
but as muted trumpets
stir the choir to its feet
I’m gone a thousand miles
I’ve gone twenty years
into the sunlight
of a baked-brown hillside
near Assisi I remember
as a sloping orchard
close to the end of summer
at the mouth of a tent
I gaze at sweltering heat
alone but thinking of her
across the Alps
across the Channel
my earphones growling
with these same notes--
I’ve no money for my bread
I’ve no gift for my love
the tenor’s plight rolls
on the spool of tape
running steadily down
like a little clock of longing
though within a week
I’ll have re-crossed Europe
to fall into her arms
set foot on the path
to where this tenor’s lament
asks the same redemption
of two hundred voices
weepingly as one
these voices concluding
at last with silence
that pause of reluctance
as we pick up the threads
of the evening--realise
what our hands are for
moving to defer words
unless it is in this way
we try to repeat the gift
of the dreamwork
of the singers against
the dreamwork of the past
to fling it forward
against anger and grief
against the coming need
_