Prospero's Poetry – Verses by Richard Benger

Choir

From cream coloured sopranos to dark molasses bass, apple green altos to tenors of champagne,

Slivers of silver, shards of steel a primal nature disorientates;

Gibbons, tree frogs, katydids, whales, crickets, cicadas, blackbirds, humans called their messages, sang their songs

For now, words drive us. In this tower of Babel, voices heave in torrents,

There is quiet, the sun has gone down. We are at dusk, and now they come.

Like a soft drum roll or a bass recorder, the rising moan of a night time wind

Sperm and egg, foetus, baby, our way to crossing life's wide ocean, fresh from birth when all is new,

A candle lit for him, a candle lit for her, in quiet amidst twelve shining tongues of light.

The kingdom of the living and the dead, perhaps is somewhere just within our head;

He woke in the morning, a bright day in June, knowing he needed to be out quite soon,

When our fellow human beings start to ail, and fail, and fall,

I am older than my parents were When they were young. In innocence of youth they met, And song of their love was sung.