PROLOGUE: duet
My soul cries out with love
of all that walk and swim and fly
From the mountains and the sky
Out of the depths of the sea
Love cries and cries in me.

INSTRUMENTAL PRELUDE

ALL DAY IT HAS RAINED
All day it has rained
and we on the edge of the moors
have sprawled in our bell tents
moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets
spread on the muddy ground.
And from the first grey wakening
we have found no refuge
from the skirmishing fine rain
and the wind that makes the canvass heave and flap
and the taut wet guy ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream
drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
snatched from their cups by the wild south westerly,
pattered against the tent
and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
reading the Sunday papers. I saw a fox
and mentioned it in a note I scribbled home.
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome
And thought of the quiet dead
and the loud celebrities exhorting us to slaughter
and the herded refugees
Yet thought softly, morosely of them
and as indifferently as of ourselves
or those whom we for years have loved
and will again tomorrow maybe love.
But now it is the rain possesses us entirely
The twilight and the rain.

SONG
Oh journeyman, Oh journeyman
before this endless belt began
its cruel revolutions, you and she
naked in Eden, shook the apple tree.

Oh soldier lad, oh soldier lad,
before the soul of things turned bad
she offered you so modestly
a shining apple from the tree.

Oh lonely wife, oh lonely wife,
before your lover left this life
he took you in his gentle arms.
How trivial then were life's alarms.

And though death taps down every street
familiar as the postman on his beat
Remember this, remember this,
that life has trembled in a kiss
from genesis to genesis
and what's transfigured will live on
long after death has come and gone.