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Four Songs
2009–2012

voice
piano

SCORE
A Dream Deferred
My Papa's Waltz
Ode to Clothes
Laughing Together

A Dream Deferred – first performance:
Sumner Thompson and Linda Osborn-Blaschke
WordSong / Boston / April 19, 2009

My Papa's Waltz – first performance:
Sarah Pelletier and John McDonald
WordSong / Harvard Musical Association / April 10, 2010

Ode to Clothes commissioned by David Kravitz
first performance:
David Kravitz and James Busby
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Boston / January 2010

Laughing Together – first performance:
Kendra Colton and Linda Osborn-Blaschke
WordSong / Somerville / August 4, 2012

RECORDINGS
A Dream Deferred – studio recording by Aaron Engebreth and Linda Osborn-Blaschke
My Papa's Waltz – studio recording by Sarah Pelletier and John McDonald



TEXTS
Harlem 
What happens to a dream deferred? 

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet? 

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. 

Or does it explode? 

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) 


My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy. 

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself. 

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle. 

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt. 

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)


Ode to Clothes
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely
risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollows of your legs,
and so embraced
by your indefatigable faithfulness
I rise, to tread the grass,
enter poetry,
consider through the windows,
the things,
the men, the women,
the deeds and the fights
go on forming me,
go on making me face things
working my hands,
opening my eyes,
using my mouth,
and so,
clothes,
I too go forming you,
extending your elbows,
snapping your threads,
and so your life expands
in the image of my life.
In the wind
you billow and snap
as if you were my soul,
at bad times
you cling
to my bones,
vacant, for the night,
darkness, sleep
populate with their phantoms
your wings and mine. I wonder
if one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will leave you stained with my blood
and then
you will die with me
or one day
not quite
so dramatic
but simple,
you will fall ill,
clothes,
with me,
grow old
with me, with my body
and joined
we will enter
the earth.
Because of this
each day
I greet you
with reverence and then
you embrace me and I forget you,
because we are one
and we will go on
facing the wind, in the night,
the streets or the fight,
a single body,
one day, one day, some day, still. 

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) trans. A.S. Kline 


Laughing Together
(A term reportedly used by some Native peoples
of the Americas for lovemaking)
So this is how it's done,
this lauhing together
that anneals, that heals and works
a miracle—no, a hundred miracles,
and makes such heat, burning
through the husk of habit
and of time, some dream
recalled, not in repose
but on the light
of a thousand suns.

And what can bloom
in such a landscape?
Everything
the glint of your teeth
in the close and friendly dark,
the wartm spice of your breath.
your skin, your eyes, uour hands,
my eyes and hands opening,
mouth arms legs opening
wide in the body's warmest smile.

Laughing, and together,
we are reaching,
blind, to find
the lines and llimits
of the love
this laughing makes.

Rebecca Blevins Faery