music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Passage 2005 countertenor theremin harp celesta 3 cellos duration 18' SCORE Cut Grass The Trees (interim) First Sight The Trees TEXTS Cut Grass Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death.  It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn.  White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace.  First Sight Lambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro All they find, outside the fold, Is a wretched width of cold.  As they wait beside the ewe, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, waiting too, Earth’s immeasurable surprise. They could not grasp it if they knew, What so soon will wake and grow Utterly unlike the snow.  The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread Their greenness is a kind of grief.  Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain.  Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Philip Larkin (1922-1985)