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Passage
2005

countertenor
theremin
harp
celesta
3 cellos

duration 18'

SCORE
Cut Grass
The Trees (interim)
First Sight
The Trees


TEXTS
Cut Grass
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death. 

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn. 

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace. 


First Sight
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold. 

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow. 


The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)