Herstory I

Song Cycle by Elizabeth Walton Vercoe (b. 1941)

1. Noon walk on the asylum lawn  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
The summer sun ray
 [ ... ]

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2. Her Kind  [sung text not yet checked]

Language: English 
I have gone out, a possessed witch
 [ ... ]

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3. Side by side
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
Ho! in the dawn
 [ ... ]

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4a. For a Child:  The Crib
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
You sleeping I bend to cover
 [ ... ]

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4b. Morning song
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Text Authorship:

  • by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963), "Morning Song", appears in Ariel, first published 1965

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5. Mirror
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
I am silver and exact.  I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful --
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink with speckles.  I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart.  But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake.  A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of the hands.

I am important to her.  She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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6. Old
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
Death starts like a dream
 [ ... ]

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7. Sleep
 (Sung text)

Language: English 
Lullaby./ Weave my threads to sleep
 [ ... ]

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Total word count: 708