Cathedral 2021

Completed in 2018

For Voice and Piano

Music by Gabrielle Liriano

Lyrics adapted from Poem by Richard Jones

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Cathedral 

Poem by Richard Jones

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Songbirds live in the old cathedral,

caged birds bought at the street market

and freed as a kind of offering.

Now doves and finches and parakeets

nest in the crooks of the nave’s highest arches,

roosting on the impossibly high

sills of stained-glass windows,

looking down into the valley of the altar

as if from cliffs.

 

Twice a day, you’ll hear them singing:

at dawn when the blue light

of angels’ wings

and the yellow light of halos

flood into their nests to wake them;

and during the mass

when the organ fills

the valley below with thunder.

these birds love thunder,

never having seen a drop of rain.

They love it when the people below stand up

and sing. They fly

in mad little loops from window to window,

from the tops of arches

down toward the candles in the tombs,

making the sign of the cross.

 

If you look up during mass

to the world’s light falling

to the arms of saints,

you can see birds flying

true blue columns of incense

as if it were simple wood smoke

rising from a cabin’s chimney

in a remote and hushed forest.