LISA NEHER | MEZZO-SOPRANO | COMPOSER
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Picture

Upon a Broken World

for reciter and piano
7 minutes
​Poetry by Danusha Laméris, Amy Lowell, and Maggie Smith
Commissioned by Dr. Marian Wilson-Kimber for Red Vespa Duo
Digital Score Download: Available for purchase in the summer of 2021. Contact Lisa to pre-order. 

Program note

Coming soon!

poems

1. September, 1917 by Amy Lowell

​This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.
2. Good Bones by Maggie Smith
​

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Poetry used by permission of Maggie Smith and Tupelo Press

3. Small Kindnesses 
by
 Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk 
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs 
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” 
when someone sneezes, a leftover 
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. 
And sometimes, when you spill lemons 
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you 
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, 
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile 
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress 
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, 
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far 
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. 
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these 
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Copyright 2019 Danusha Laméris. First published in Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection from Green Writers Press. Used with permission of the author.
Copyright Lisa Neher 2021, All Rights Reserved.
  • Home
  • About
    • Biography
    • Calendar
    • Discography
    • Gallery
    • Press Kit
  • Work With Me
    • Voice and Composition Studio
    • Coaching
    • Composer S.O.S. Session
    • Classes & Workshops
  • Singing
    • Listen
    • Repertoire
    • One Voice Project
  • Compositions
    • Sheet Music Store
    • Commission Me!
    • Catalog
  • Bassoon Sonata Consortium
  • Save the Earth
  • Something About Isolation
  • Opera Festival
  • Of Wind and Waves
  • Contact
  • Blog