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Attention! Some of this material is not in the public domain.

It is illegal to copy and distribute copyright-protected material without permission. It is also illegal to reprint copyright texts or translations without the name of the author or translator.

Note: You must use the copyright symbol © when you reprint copyright-protected material.

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© by Kate Gale

Shura
Language: English 
It wasn’t a face anymore. A broken thing.
Opened wide by time and cavernous washes of memory.
Waves of what might have been.
The memory where my sister’s face
was is empty of light and shadow.
Time rushed in leaving stains only of itself.
All hollows and blank fields where iridescent sunshine
glances off, goes its own way. Search for eyes shining.
Nothing. Huge dark spaces. Lips that move randomly
around parroted word shapes. A face like leaf shards buried.
What used to be alive pieces floating around
just under the surface, you see them give way to decay.
Used to hold water and sunlight, echo sky even.
Now darkness. A face once. Surely a face.

Text Authorship:

  • by Kate Gale , "Shura", appears in Echo Light, Red Mountain Press, first published 2014, copyright © 2014, (re)printed on this website with kind permission [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Mark Abel (b. 1948), "Shura" [voice and piano], from The Palm Trees are Restless. Five Poems of Kate Gale, no. 4, Oceangoing Music (ASCAP) [
     text verified 1 time
    ]

Researcher for this page: Mark Abel

This text was added to the website: 2016-04-19
Line count: 14
Word count: 116

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