Reconciliation (2016) 3'
For tenor or baritone and piano. (Either version available upon request.)
Premiered in Field Concert Hall, 10/26/16. Self-published (Morningside Press, ASCAP).
Reconciliation, from Leaves of Grass
WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in
time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world:
…For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I
draw near;
I bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face
in the coffin.
- Walt Whitman
Listen:
From "The Battle of Atlanta," a cyclorama painting