music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings The Wind and the Harvest 1989 SATB chorus 3 percussion   1: crotales, guiro, 3 suspended cymbals, tabor, 3 temple blocks, 4 tom-toms, wind machine    2: gongs, 2 log drums, ricciane, snare drum, tam-tam, tenor drum, triangle    3: bass drum, cuica, guiro, sizzle cymbal, 4 splash cymbals, tambourine duration 18' SCORE Wind Amnesia Noon The Harvest TEXTS Wind This is the wind, the wind in a field of corn. Great crowds are fleeing from a major disaster  Down the long valleys, the green swaying wadis, Down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind.  Families, tribes, nations and their livestock Have heard something, seen something. An expectation  Or a gigantic misunderstanding has swept over the hilltop Bending the ear of the hedgerow with stories of fire and sword.  I saw a thousand years pass in two seconds. Land was lost, languages rose and divided. This lord went east and found safety. His brother sought Africa and a dish of aloes.  Centuries, minutes later, one might ask How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy. And somewhere they will sing: "Like chaff we were borne In the wind." This is the wind in a field of corn  James Fenton (b.1949)  Amnesia  If there were a world more disturbing than this Where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole And overgrown tropical plants Rotted, effervescent in the muggy twilight, and monkeys Screamed something That came to sound like words to each other Across the triple-canopy jungle you shared, You don't remember it.  You tell yourself no and cry a thousand days. You imagine that the crows calling autumn into place Are your brothers and you could If only the strength and will were there Fly up to them to be black And useful to the wind.  Bruce Weigl (b.1949)  Noon I'm digging holes for three wilted saplings— pin oak, mulberry, flowering crab— behind a tract house reeking freshly sawn boards in the heat of a July afternoon. After 22 years in dorm rooms, the Air Force, a string of roach-filled apartments and rent houses, I am a home owner. Transparencies swarming from my hat, I squat on my heels among clods of red clay and green shoots of grass then let myself unroll. I am forty. In ten years I will be fifty and this yard will be shaded. Now, the heat is excrutiating. The rumble of trucks and cars floats over across rooftops from the throughway. It is the Delta and I am sprawling on my back in copper-colored dirt after filling sandbags. Through the earth I feel the kicks of an airstrike that goes on a klick away. Choppers are wheeling overhead like hornets. But this is not a poem about the war. I'm tired of it always being the war. This is a poem about how, if I place my head, that stick of mulberry tree in the shape of a Y shades my eyes from the sun.  Perry Oldham  The Harvest  I will wait for the harvest. One more crescent moon to come. My scythe is as fine as the body of   a woman moved by love. I will gather the crops, one by one, and stack my granaries. Come, my friends, help yourselves. There is hunger in our father's house. It hasn't rained for a thousand seasons. The soil is like  acne on the earth's body. My times are mounds of emptiness. The plants spring up again. The river reaches the sea. The traveller returns home. The dream   crosses the threshold. Until he comes, minutes of our lives, sing, undress and wash in our presence, pencil your   eyes with the moment's flash. What is coming is not born yet, our loved son is present. One more crescent moon. My scythe dances in the field, my granaries burst with the season's crops. Come, my friends, help yourselves. And when the time comes we will sow for another season.  Yusuf al-Khal (1917–1987) trans. Abdullah al-Udhari