Listening to Tippett Twice: A Child of Our Time (1944)

South Kensington now

I’m early at the table

wait patiently with a beer

then rise with a kiss to greet her

and my day's been real

in the absence of dreams

so ordinary real

to include the buying of bread

then making a few calls

coffee and a newspaper’s

rancour and grief

and time always fixing times –

now a wash of notes

tentatively rising

from the well of the hall

though it's hard to give them

the attention they need

with these nervous coughs

firing like gunshots

but as muted trumpets

stir the choir to its feet

I’m gone a thousand miles

I’ve gone twenty years

into the sunlight

of a baked-brown hillside

near Assisi I remember

as a sloping orchard

close to the end of summer

at the mouth of a tent

I gaze at sweltering heat

alone but thinking of her

across the Alps

beyond the Channel

my earphones growling

with these same notes –

I’ve no money for my bread

I have no gift for my love

the tenor's plight rolling

on a spool of tape

running steadily down

like a little clock of longing

though within a week

I’ll have re-crossed Europe

fallen into her arms

set foot on the path

to where this tenor's lament

asks the same redemption

from two hundred voices

weepingly as one

these voices concluding

at last with silence

the pause of reluctance

as we pick up the threads

of the evening we realise

what our hands are for

moving to defer words

unless it is in this way

to try to repeat the gift

of the dreamwork

of the singers against

the dreamwork of the past

to fling it forward

against rancour and grief

against the coming need

MARTYN CRUCEFIX

To an English Composer

Landscapes flourish best

indoors. Here's one

you turned into music, green

in lush dissonance with green,

forty years ago. It glows