baritone
piano 

duration 12' 

SCORE
Before You Came
Love Song
Be Near Me 

TEXTS
Before You Came
Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine. 

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze.
The yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires. 

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing. 

Don't leave me now that you're here–
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) 
trans. Agha Shahid Ali



Love Song
How shall I keep my soul
from touching yours? How shall
I lift it over you toward other things?
Ah, I would like to lodge it
in the dark with some lost thing
on some foreign silent place
that doesn't tremble, when your depths stir.
Yet everything that touches you and me
takes us together like a bow's stroke
that from two strings draws one voice.
Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) 
trans. Edward Snow 



Be Near Me
You who demolish me, you whom I love,
be near me. Remain near me when evening,
drunk on the blood of the skies,
becomes night, in its one hand
a perfumed balm, in the other
a sword sheathed in the diamond of stars. 

Be near me when night laments or sings,
or when it begins to dance,
its steel-blue anklets ringing with grief. 

Be here when longings, long submerged
in the heart´s waters, resurface
and everyone begins to look: 
Where is the assassin? In whose sleeve
is hidden the redeeming knife? 

And when wine, as it is poured, is the sobbing
of children whom nothing will console—
when nothing holds,
when nothing is:
at that dark hour when night mourns,
be near me, my destroyer, my lover,
be near me. 

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) 
trans. Agha Shahid Ali 



Before You Came and Be Near Me from The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated and edited by Agha Shahid Ali (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995). Copyright © 1991 by Agha Shahid Ali. Used by Permission.

Love Song from New Poems (1907) by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. Translation. Copyright © 1984 by Edward Snow. Used by arrangement with North Point Press,
a division of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved.