The Rain in the Trees
FOR FLUTE, SOPRANO AND ORCHESTRA
(REVISED FOR SOPRANO AND ORCHESTRA — 2000)
Details
Commissioned: by Kay Logan for the Chautauqua Institute; written for Carol WIncenc and Barbara Hendricks
Premiere: April 26, 1993; Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Lorin Maazel, conductor; Barbara Hendricks, soprano; Carol Wincenc, flute
Orchestra Instrumentation: 3.3.3.3-4.2.3.1-timp-vibes-harp-pno-strings
Publisher: Schott Helicon Music Corporation (BMI)
Duration: 30’
Text
The Rain in the Trees
W.S. Merwin
I. Witness
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.
II. Native Trees
Neither my father nor my mother knew
the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that
I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed
surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch
walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade
Were there trees
where they were children
where I had not been
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born
and in that time did
my father and my mother see them
and when they said yes it meant
they did not remember
What were they I asked what were they
but both my father and my mother
said they never knew
Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.
III. To the Insects
Elders
we have been here so short a time
and we pretend that we have invented memory
we have forgotten what it is like to be you
who do not remember us
we remember imagining that what survived us
would be like us
and would remember the world as it appears to us
but it will be your eyes that will fill with light
we kill you again and again
and we turn into you
eating the forests
eating the earth and the water
and dying of them
departing from ourselves
leaving you the morning
in its antiquity
Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.
IV. Place
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
what for
not for the fruit
the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted
I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time
with the sun already
going down
and the water
touching its roots
in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing
one by one
over its leaves
Text © 1988 by W.S. Merwin. Reproduced by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for the author. All rights reserved.