Stars in Your Bones
Composed by: Joan Szymko
Year composed: 2017
Text by: Alla Bozarth
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Duration: 3:50
Program Notes:
Joan Szymko is widely regarded as a leading composer of choral music in America today. She has been stirring up the pool of repertoire for women’s chorus for over thirty years as both a composer and conductor. The American Choral Directors Association recognized Szymko’s lasting impact on the choral arts in America by selecting her as the recipient of the Raymond W. Brock Memorial Commission in 2010. “Stars in Your Bones” is the third prose poem by Alla Bozarth that Szymko has set. Alla Bozarth is a poet and prose writer, a therapist and an Episcopal priest, and holds a Ph.D. in the performing arts and a certificate in Gestalt psychotherapy. She lives at the foot of Mt. Hood in Western Oregon. Her poems are widely used all over the world, often in collaboration with visual artists, singers, and dancers. Joan Szymko: “I am drawn to Ms. Bozarth’s imagery and to her universal expression of spirituality.”
Additional Notes
Instrumentation: Piano
Language: English
Text:
The small plot of ground
on which you were born
cannot be expected
to stay forever
the same.
Earth changes,
and home becomes different
places.
You took flesh
from clay
but the clay
did not come
from just one
place.
To feel alive,
important, and safe,
know your own waters
and hills, but know
more.
You have stars in your bones
and oceans
in blood.
You have opposing
terrain in each eye
you belong to the land
and sky of your first cry,
you belong to infinity.