Plum Gatherer › 2016
soprano, cimbalom | 11:45 | for Ludovico Ensemble
text by Edna St. Vincent Millay
premiere: Ludovico Ensemble; May 2, 2016 at St. Paul’s Church, Brookline MA
text:
The angry nettle and the mild
Grew together under the blue plum-trees.
I could not tell as a child
Which was my friend of these.
Always the angry nettle in the skirt of his sister
Caught my wrist that reached over the ground,
Where alike I gathered,—for the one was sweet, and the other wore a frosty dust—
The broken plum and the sound.
The plum-trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them,
That stood so white in the spring.
I would give, to recall the sweetness and the frost of the lost blue plums,
Anything, anything.
I thrust my arm among the grey ambiguous nettles, and wait.
But they do not sting.
Edna St. Vincent Millay – The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems, 1928
score: pdf download | hard copy
press: boston classical review
