Strikes Storm

Ben Morris Strikes Storm

Boskoff

Strikes Storm for tenor, horn in F, and piano

Total Duration: ca. 6’50”

Notes

In the piano, the following pitches should be muted with blue sticky tack for the duration of the piece unless otherwise noted: F7, Eb7, Db7, D7, C7, Bb0, Db1, C1, Eb1, F1, and Ab1. Later in the piece, at rehearsal O, add tack to E7, C1, D1, E1, F1, and A1.

Text

We have always worn the end of the world as a skin. and that same world’s beginning.

Here, death takes the form of a filament of flame, as a thread of the substance of life.

Here, water, which understands neither demise nor origin, leaks as from a beast’s breast a clear dark

naive of salt’s staining, becoming now the touch making harps of the tender leaves’ backs, becoming now rot’s provenance and devourer of limestone.

Earth waits for a fate to be written, re written. rehashed caverns or the scattering

of seedlings or the coastlines’ illustration or the elder trees pulled up by unfathomable leviathan roots

this is a framework, not a violence. the line is drawn at the question of will.

Charge splinters into noise, Noise scatters water, water traces the wind’s crest,

wind repatterns land, which clasps what is given until taken back.

The prairies have no fate. The forests, no fate. The rivers, none, but that we make each the other’s cause and shelter. food and flesh.

our labor is our consequence, and our consequence, our grace: like the organs of an animal, not one part of us may ever be pure of the other.

MarissaDavis