Poetry
During the Appear! Inspire! A Celebration of Music concert taking place on November 22 the ASU Chamber Singers and Chamber Orchestra will perform Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia”
Conductor and Professor of Music David Schildkret and poet and Associate Professor of English Sally Ball curated the following exhibit of poems that, like Dryden’s and Auden’s, take up the story of the disdainful dame or the black swan, or otherwise riff on the language of the Dryden or Auden poems, or that address the muse who permits us to wear our tribulation like a rose.
Curated Poetry Exhibit @ The Concert
Original Poetry by Community Poets
Read the poems submitted for the St. Cecilia’s Day Project by members of our local community and then continue scrolling for links to other related poetry.
A Vision of St. Cecilia
The organ sat in candid light
With clouds that hid in misty night
A shadow of a dame so queer
It caused the ghostly tarn to fear
She came upon the hallowed place
And played each key with lasting grace
The moon seduced by her, it slept
With storm clouds quelled until they wept
Each note rang clearly in the sky
And woke the angel up on high
His tears caressed his golden lyre
Her notes had burned his heart like fire
These gentle hymns danced on a star
And reached the realms of souls afar
Who rose from dreams of light divine
And heard on them would Heaven shine
In time, the tones that God heard ring
Morphed into gleaming golden string
That shone betwixt the halo bound
To sackcloth in eternal sound
– Krishna Sinha
Brophy College Preparatory
Grade 11
Thundering Drum
(After Handel’s “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day”)
The double double double beat
Of the thundering drum
Back against the wall
No place to run
A girl with blonde hair
A boy with ripped jeans
A man who inspires children
A woman I’ve never seen
Gone
Whose skin is this?
These arms are not mine
This body remains foreign
My soul is not my mind
The closer they come
The sooner I realize
The only way to escape
Lies between my eyes
The double double double beat
Of my thundering drum
Up against my head
Has my own time come?
– Bernardo Reyes
Brophy College Preparatory
Grade 12
Musica Sacra
Ascend that scale towards Parnassus
that mellifluous ladder of intoned creation,
Good Cecilia who hath ascended,
met the muses in elation
For the world turn’d and sang,
and the zephyr winds and basso rang,
and the flute that lay untouch’d,
like the cadenza inspired,
made Musick into nascent fire,
fashioning chords of desire
It must mutter and mark,
potency from acidity
all against the bark;
But no verdancy is entertained
by that black thing birthed in vain,
that creation, undine in distress
wailing, landed at the littoral crest
May Harmony make haste in her breast
and let forth an adorable fest…
– Martín Hans Eslava
Brophy College Preparatory
Grade 12
For Saint Cecilia: The True Mother of Jazz
It is easier to want a jazz musician to roll himself
to the edge of a cliff to play a set of whale songs
than it is to want a jazz musician to play the last blues song
behind the dumpster of the corner convenience store.
Have you actually been in the ocean below the cliff
to see a man die alone – the salt spray animating
his clothing as conduit for the departing soul? It was first
carried through the water to leave record of The Black Saint.
Preferring to ask Charles Mingus’ whales to sing mourning
songs instead of Garbage Truck’s percussion of diesel,
hydraulics, concrete, and steel, Saint Cecilia untuned
the sky space above the cliff to carry up a true music.
Three weeks of untuned sky absorbing mourning will crack
the cliff from the ocean floor. Mingus was taught his last phrase
in harmony with his whales, playing a double bass, seated,
in his wheelchair. A call never to be responded.
It is easier to need jazz musicians and their blue notes
for an equal temperament has never untuned the sky.
Saint Cecilia is the true mother of jazz, giving to us the liminal note
requiring us to roll ourselves to the cliff in sanctified accompaniment.
– Scott Hodnefield
ASU English, Creative Writing
Senior
Join Claws and Bark Hallelujah
Drive your feet through the amplifier of your heart,
you, each the coyotes caught in the barbed wire of the 24-hour news cycle.
Howl in to the harps lain just past the border of the empire.
The bolt cutters have arrived,
all jaws to the wire, all glories lifted in the bite.
Ours is the empire of forgiveness,
the entry paid by a spear through the cheek
and the jaws again splayed naked in praise, this night, and the moon
is not beautiful, is not available, no.
The glory here is the ground swell in your chest.
The savior here is behind the eyes that look for a distant light
and find the backlit skyline rising from the shale.
The Via Appia lead to flowers wreathing belief.
The honeybees tremolo pious in romantic frustration,
yes, here is the hand that helps the other through the garment.
Untune the drumming moth that keeps the chest from retreating
in on itself, believe the speed will tighten the frequencies and then
Hosanna, the lord, Hosanna, the Southern lights, Hosanna.
Glory be to the mosh pit, peace be unto the punks,
and good will to the martyrs who heard the song in each of us, the animals.
– Jordan Dahlen
ASU English, Creative Writing
Junior
Composing Love
Alone
Notes fall flat and
Diminuendo into silence
Niente
This solo is my refrain
My requiem
The augmentation of quiet deafens my heart
Yet I strain to hear
I search for sound
Crossing the bridge, we meet
Our prelude whispers to my heart
A pianissimo that brightens and shapes
Our future
Waltzing through the steps
We count the rhythm
Fumbling in a meandering staccato
Then slip into a rallentando
Losing the tempo
I look into your eyes
Rest
You look into mine
Rest
We start again, pick up the stride
With modulation, we change key
Sharpen our focus
An arpeggio to a sforzando of our
Heartbeats
They sing in unison and
Crescendo to fortissimo
Though our songs may differ
They harmonize to write the most beautiful music
The strings of my heart play and
Resonate
For only you
Whether we play nocturnes or rhapsodies
Our tune will flow
Melodiously
Together
Come,
Sing with me
– Kimberly Nicole Kottman
ASU English, Creative Writing
Senior
Where Cecilia Goes to Pray
She’s in the city square with her guitar case at her feet.
Strangers pay Cecilia as she prays, drop crumpled dollar bills
into a sea of purple velvet. She sings a song she heard once
from a Spanish man in flip-flops and a Johnny Cash shirt.
Cecilia learned the hymns of unlawful men, plays
their psalms on her daddy’s old guitar for loose change
and the coy, apologetic smiles of those who cannot pay.
Cecilia does not do this for the money. She does it
to keep the music moving, to keep the divine nearby.
– Charlee R. Moseley
ASU English, Creative Writing
Senior
Organ of Fire
Ukraine, 2013 AD: A man wearing a mask and a wedding ring plays the Ukrainian national anthem on a piano in the snow on top of a burned bus. The bus, in the middle of a square, the square in the center of a city lined with barricades to keep out Communism. The man calls himself the Piano Extremist.
U.S., 2015 AD: A man wearing a wedding ring sends a girl a song. The song, sent via email in the middle of the night, the middle of the week. The girl, in the center of her bed, the bed cold, listens to the song on repeat until she knows it by heart.
Rome, 500 AD: A girl is married to a man. She hears music in her heart, and on her wedding night, she tells him she is watched over by an angel. The man is baptized, returns to his wife, and sees the angel. The man is burned, his brother is burned, and the woman becomes a saint, holding an organ.
Ukraine, 1240 AD: A church, St. Michael’s, sounds the bell tower for days, the city seized by Mongols. The Mongols won the battle, destroying the tomb of Pope Clement. The next time the bells ring, it is November 2013. The police circle the square, the people build a barricade, the president breaks a promise.
U.S., 2015 AD: The girl meets the man with the wedding ring at a park. They make love in his car. She finds, weeks later, she is pregnant. The girl takes a pill. The girl gets a rose tattoo. The man takes off his wedding ring, watching her. They listen to the song on repeat, headphones on.
Ukraine, 2015 AD: Russian soldiers without insignia invade Crimea. Annex: from annectere, ‘to join,’ ‘to bind.’ The Ukrainian people go to war, their cities bombed, their army anemic.
– Kalani Pickhart
ASU English, MFA in Creative Writing
Fiction, first-year
incorruptibility
after St. Cecilia
They took her body as their own to destroy—
first in a warm bath, they failed to take her breath.
Three times beheaded and she lived: still
enough time to sing to her friends
and her pain before slipping into the tomb
where later they’d find her body
as warm and alive as it had ever been living.
Hers was the first body found untouched
by decomposition—rejecting the violent
touch of man with whatever
little we have left: our bodies dying or already dead.
– Natasha Murdock
ASU English, MFA in Creative Writing
Poetry, third-year
Our Severance
a poem for St. Cecilia’s Day
And so it is with every song, Cecilia,
played and sung that we chase
black over the staff, line and space,
those footsteps your swan left.
We manage, terminally, accordingly,
with our instrument to the beat and time
of our circumstance, a blind pitch cast
into some far off field with little guidance,
those fleeting notes that warble
inside us to wilt beautifully or bellow.
Through the pass, we shall look
for your angel, beyond the coda,
beyond the trail of the pen, the sword
come down on all of us to the tune
of the trumpets, that brass music
promising to lead us into the sky.
– Dustin Pearson
ASU English, MFA in Creative Writing
Poetry, third-year
Links to Existing Poetry Related to St. Cecilia’s Day
Geoffrey Chaucer, “Second Nun’s Prologue” in The Canterbury Tales, tells the story of St Cecilia, 1373
John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” 1687
Christopher Smart, “Ode on St Cecilia’s Day,” 1770
“Sainte,” A poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, 1865, and first titled “Sainte Cécile jouant sur l’aile d’un chérubin” (Saint Cecilia Playing on an Angel’s Wing), in which the material image of a viola has faded from a stained-glass window but has been replaced, as shafts of light radiate from the setting sun, by immaterial images: first of the feathers of an angel’s wing and then, in a second mutation, by the strings of a harp on which the fingers of Saint Cecilia can create music, thus drawing sound from silence. (Poetry Foundation)
George Barker, “Ode Against St. Cecilia’s Day,” 1949
James Tate, “It Happens Like This,” 2003
Not St. Cecilia by Name But Relevant Literature
Susan Stewart, from “Lessons from Television,” 2003
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Black Swan,” 2010
Rebecca Wolff, “Am I Special,” 2015
Participate
Inspired to create your own poetry? Share your inspiration in the comment section below!
Explore the annotations (or add your own) to W. H. Auden’s Anthem to St. Cecilia Day
Find out more about music inspired by St. Cecilia and #StCeciliasDay
