1. |
Evangeline
04:57
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Once there was a woman
I am one eighth part her
Finely measured and divided
Mixed with coal and Jersey butter
This is all fractured framing -
She did not ever know of me
And I do not even know her name,
We shall call her Evangeline
And spy her of an evening
In 1938
Through the memory of a memory
Of a girl who came home late
"Come in, my daughter
The night's grown cold and dark for hours
Closer, my daughter
What kind of trouble are you bringing to this house?
So you've been out dancing
Don't you know there's gonna be a war?
No, you wouldn't know it
You didn't see the one before"
"So Mama, tell me
Did you never dance with a man?
Yes Mama, tell me
Are you grown too old to understand?"
How the young resent the old
And the old, in turn, the young
For one is battle weary
And the other's war's to come
But time is a slippery rope
Without affixèd ends
Who says where the sun ceases setting
And begins, once more, to ascend?
So I fall (fall with me)
Through the bounds of a century
Past my grandmother to her mother
Pseudo Evangeline
The cause is affecting
The effects are yet unseen
The trenches are refilled
The land returned to green
The babes are all unborn
And some are unconceived
And the war is called the Great War
For worse cannot be foreseen
Yet all this is to happen
For my presence makes it so
Even when the rope is slipperiest
You cannot dare let go
Unhide the marriage certificate
With its damning date!
(Tell her you lied)
Tell your daughter
You too once came home late!
(Do right)
Tell her how you adored her
When she was newly born!
(By what he left behind)
Tell her how to love
A man that's lost at war!
But if I can put words to her
She cannot hear me
That is my share of the rope
Hers is mortality
So fall, fall with me
To she we call Evangeline
And we'll meet her in the burning
Of 1917
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2. |
Wedding Morning
01:41
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It's wedding day, wedding day!
Wedding day six months too late
How you gonna lie, tired and grey,
In the bed you've made?
Mother fixed me up a marriage drawer
Silks and sheets and jewellery
All half filled 'fore I was four
And ritually shown to me
What a fine thing it is, to be a wife! To be a mother
What a fine thing it is to love another! (Always in these binds.
I find her words still often come to mind)
1 Corinthians 7:2
Don't give what you can't afford to lose
But in the end I didn't choose
For there to be a war
It's wedding day, wedding day!
Wasn't meant to be this way
Him on necessary leave
And me grown strangely overweight
What a fine thing it is, to be a wife! To be a mother
What a fine thing it is to have a lover gone to war
And a babe ripe to be born
And your own mother sobbing cruelly
Over silks and sheets and jewellery
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3. |
Sweetness
03:03
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Sweetness: peeling back my lids
A dawning, a softness on my skin
Fresh linen, peonies and sugared plums
Dancing: now all walking feels like dance
Talking, huddled pondside in the park
Easy, peonies and sugared plums
My friends and your friends
And stumbling love letters
Rain showers and plucked flowers
And sweet sugared plums
I know what they know now
When they talk of knowing
I'm heady, unsteady
And easily won
You have a kind voice
And tall sloping shoulders
You bring me pink peonies
And sweet sugared plums
In summer, the river fallen low
Birdsong, the spires set aglow
A falseness, the Thames never so clean
Memories: fallen out of time
Easy to think that they aren't mine
And easier to live inside as waking dreams
I stargaze and think the stars are men
Send heavenward to be born again
Then shudder and shutter the window tight
Sweet plums and peonies
And easy-spoke wishes
Skylarks and green parks
And swiftly-stole kisses
Reckless and feckless
And heedless and young
Laughing with delight
At the sweetness of plums
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4. |
Digging
06:35
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In the night the sky burns bright
It's always night, the clock ain't right
The cycle's out - for twenty-eight days
The sky's been dark, the air choke haze
I don't wish to die but think we might
The little birds have all took fright
For they cannot stand the sound or sight
Of us digging
If all these animals premonition
The follies of the glorious mission
Still little hope of the donkeys listening
And packing us home to mother
Sweet England! What we're fighting for -
Who waved white breasted from the shore
And sent her young sons off to war -
Is burnt away in mustard
I third a cigarette with Tom and Jacques
As we stand and peer across the land
We walked last night (or the one before)
That is of no man but Mistress War
She clears the bed of all its spies!
Sends them twitt'ring to the skies!
And slips inside your head
With thoughts of infidelity
We spot some errant part of man
Where he should not be - a hand
Clawing for the sky from land
That once grew green but now lies damned
For we took the earth and scored it deep
Pocked with barbs, artillery
Little wonder that it weeps to see
Us digging
Haw! This barren irony
Back home she grows so verdantly
Evangeline, who thinks of me
As living, though I soon might not be
In the night the sky is burning
The clock ain't right, the world quits turning
The air is fire, the ground is mud
And shit and sick and piss and blood
The gas will come before the dawn
Blind and choke me without warning
Kill me seven years hence
If I am spared the barbed wire fence
I look to the sky and to Tom and Jacques
And those that went and ain't come back
In this unbirthing - backwards-turning,
black-earth churning hellish burning
The little birds are all long flown
Unto some untouched reach (back home!)
Where blue and green retain their brightness
And day is day and night is night
Where my yet-unborn will skip and play
And wonder of his father's day
(Who lay perhaps mud drowned at Ypres
While his mother rocked his newborn sleep)
"Did you make these little games?"
These games, I can't recall their names
Only played the game of war
That he should not - this I fight for
And though I might not, I hope to live
And see once more the English cliffs
That Evangeline need not scar her skin
With digging
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5. |
Stella
03:20
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There's one star less in the sky overhead
I stole it in the pains of my birthing bed
I've grown it, homed it, giv'n it life
I've named it, claimed it, daughter mine
But her soul came down on a wind from afar
And made my girl from the shards of distant stars
Every night the sun will set
Every morning it rises up again
It rises up again
Don't go forgetting you were sprouted in the heavens
Don't go fretting for these old mortal terrors
The bombs couldn't make the sky fall to earth
The sky will only fall for my star-shard girl
Every night the sun will set
Every morning it rises up again
It rises up again
Amongst it all - the yell, the noise
The hell of all these broken boys
The hours I pass in sick unsleep
The cracking salt I nightly weep
Shell of a man lost to my touch
Sucked away in Flanders mud -
Comes earthly star born anew
And I love you, oh, I love you
May you never see the clouds darken to warrior fleets
Weeping over our city's sleeping streets
Nor the dirt that sunk your father in barbed wire
Nor the cur that hunts with hunger-narrowed eyes
Nor the promenading ladies whose gazes tend to linger
Looking at my belly, looking at my finger
Every night the sun will set
They call the sun a star, they do
I stole my star from the sky
And whisper to her now: I love you, I love you
(I love you) I love you, I love you
(I love you) I love you, I love you
(I love you) I love you, I love you
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6. |
Wedding Night
07:20
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You touched me first like you didn't know what touching was
Like you'd never touched before
Reverent and slow
I touched you like I was a drowning beast
Like I would die
If I let go
We fell in love so sweetly! Like children do
Your ears would bloom (peonies and sugared plums)
When you saw me
Then I held a man between my legs and teeth
Down at the riverside
Blossom in the trees
Love, hope and fear!
And the greatest of these is love
Feel me near
Pressing in like a homing dove
When we move together I find my words too rough
To speak of love
I need another tongue
Do not fret for where the little birds will go
I will call you home
When the war is won
Love, hope and fear!
And the greatest of these is love
Feel me near
Pressing in like a homing dove
What a fine thing it is, to be a wife! If this is wedding
What a fine thing, this bedding
Clawing like we're dying
Like the whole world is on fire
Like if we just climbed one rung higher
We could a-wing and fly away
Oh Evangeline! (Evangeline)
Oh Evangeline! (Evangeline)
Look now and see my skin is a swollen fish
Hid best I can
An unholy thing
I can only half recall how I touched you then
My hand's grown heavy
My glinting ring
Shines out to me that this is sanctified
What we bound in flesh
Is writ in law
But we move like players at a funeral
You (gone by dawn)
Me (drowned once more)
Love, fear and hope
And the greatest of these is fear
Touch my thrumming throat
Feel the drums drawing near
In the dark, the beat returns to me in waves
The heat, the shuddering
Your little sigh
The moonlight slithers in through a windowpane
I lick the teardrops
From your eye
Love, fear and hope
And the greatest of these is love
"The greatest of these is love!"
Coos your homing dove
Before the night is done
Invoke my name and let it stand as testament
(These ritual invocations)
To what we've done and that you will return
(Are my darling's declarations)
And call again to me:
Evangeline!
The cause is affecting, the effects are unseen
Evangeline!
The trenches are refilled, the land returned to green
Evangeline!
The babes are all unborn, some are unconceived
Evangeline!
All wars are called the last for worse cannot be believed
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7. |
Stella (Spanish)
03:22
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Hay una estrella menos en el cielo
La he robado en todo el dolor del parto
La he dado cuerpo, casa, vida
La he dado nombre: niña mía
Pero su alma vino por un viento más allá
Y formó a mija desde los cascos de estrellas
Los cascos de estrellas
Cada noche el sol se pondrá
Cada mañana lo nos iluminará
Lo nos iluminará
Que nunca olvides tu raíces celestiales
Que nunca sientes los temores terrenales
El cielo no se cayó por las bombas
Sólo se cae para ella de estrellas
Y cada noche el sol se pondrá
Cada mañana lo nos iluminará
Lo nos iluminará
Y entre todo - el pasado, el ruido que nunca olvido
Las calles rotas, las pesadillas a causa de que no he dormido
Este medio hombre que he medio perdido en una trinchera llenda del miedo -
Viene una estrella desde el cielo y te quiero, te quiero
Que nunca veas las nubes guerreristas
Llorando sobre las calles de nuestra ciudad
Ni el lodo que atrapó a tu papá en alambre
Ni el lobo que camina con dientes hechos de hambre
Ni los ojos de las damas, siempre paseando,
Mirando mi barriga, mirando mi mano
Cada noche el sol se pondrá
Se llaman el sol una estrella
He robado mi estrella desde el cielo
Y murmuro a mi estrella: te quiero, te quiero
Te quiero, te quiero
Te quiero, te quiero
Te quiero, te quiero
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Bethan Le Mas England, UK
I am a British singer-songwriter, playing piano, guitar, cello,Celtic harp, ukulele, and whatever else I can get my hands on. Livestreaming on twitch.tv/cornyears
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