One day I received a poem in the mail from my friend, Saskatchewan poet laureate, John V. Hicks, who said « this came in through the window and I don’t quite know what it means yet.” When I read the poem, the image it evoked was of the Kent State Massacre in which American National Guardsmen shot into a crowd of students who were protesting the Vietnam War and killed four. I set the poem to music and called it Victims of Eagles, the “Eagles” being representative of the American government, or any overpowering body that creates victims (the national bird of Nazi Germany and of the ancient Roman Empire was also the eagle). I wrote John and told him of my thoughts which he found very interesting because he still hadn’t decided what the poem meant. He eventually named it “Burial of the Year” after I set it to music.
Then around 30 years later, I was contacted by a soprano who was going to sing Victims of Eagles and asked me if I could offer insights. So many years had passed that I had forgotten it and had to review what I had written. Soon after, I received a commission from the Odin String Quartet to write something connected to Beethoven because this year is the 250 anniversary of his birth. My first thought was that the dot dot dot dash of the opening, coincidentally Morse code for the letter V which became the symbol of Victory for the Allies during the Second World War, could also stand for the V in Victims thus binding the two works in a way the Odin Quartet had requested. At the same time, I wanted to infuse in the later “Victory” section of the quartet the spirit of Beethoven’s Fifth: uplifting and joyous.
The poem by John V. Hicks, which inspired this string quartet, is as follows:
I dreamed I walked aimlessly, seeking my bones among the bones
of the victims of eagles.
Eyrie, fearful height. I were better
not let fall. The comfort of embedded talons. I searched my mind
for pain of the fierce mandible’s rending, screams of the famished young. It must have been a quiet death, there within sight of heaven. A rebirth
in other flesh; eagles
the first to see sunrise, the last to mark the burial of light, gardens of the timeless day.
Dec. /89
Printed by kind permission of Thistledown Press Ltd. https://www.thistledownpress.com/index.cfm
