More old emails

I found this poem in an email from 7 December 1998. An interesting fact: I set this to music in a composition class I was taking and it was performed at a student exhibition.

She Sleeps Tonight:

Waiting...
For the moon to rise
And slowly bathe your body
With silver light.

You're the desert
That squishes sweat from my senses
The thirst that won't go off,
Breathing slowly by the window

Oh, if even beauty envies you,
For getting my sight out of it and into you.
Your face launches a thousand ships to me,
In search of a shore,
And they wreck...

For all eternity
I've been waiting this moment
To look you softly,
To want you in silence

Counting your hairs,
Feeling the pressure
Of your heart
Asking for more

The night is still young,
And the stars rise to love you from light-years away.
She sleeps tonight,
dreaming of snakes and love,
dreaming of snakes and love...


That's one thing about being musically oriented. I get a poem in email, and return the favour in song. My composition instructor was pretty fascinated by the whole situation, and thought that Julian and I should collaborate on several works. But I really just wanted to do that as a gift to Julian. It was my way of thanking him for what he had done for me. I never did get a recording of the performance. That would have been great to send him. As it was (and still is), I have a manuscript and that's it.

After that I moved on to Dylan Thomas. He is one of my favourite authors. One of his poems that I set to music is This Bread I Break. I'm especially fond of this song. Although I wrote it 6 years ago, I still find myself humming parts of it to myself. Here are the words to the poem:

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Hope you like the words. I'll see what I can do to get some examples of the music to go with these.