This is based on a post from 10 November, 2014.  If you read the old one note that I add quite a bit..

Several years ago I noticed the Black- Eyed Susans every time I turned around.  All summer and through the fall they were everywhere.  I went out of town for a week and on my return I didn’t see a single one.  I wrote an orchestrated “Art Song” about the disappearing flowers.

After I wrote and record this song I decided to do a song cycle based on Wildflowers.  It started/ended with a song about my “sleeping friends” under the snow.  At the beginning of the cycle I refer to the flowers as being in the womb, at the end in a tomb.  The songs go from early spring until this song.  Each one is about the particular flower, yet each one can be seen as a stage of life.  This is the last, so it is about death, with the capping song about the tomb.  I started writing music for the other songs in the cycle but didn’t get very far.  I may revisit them some day.

–Note – I do not have the voice for this type of music.  This is just a demo.

Everywhere I go
You greet me
Staring
With your flame-rimmed eye
A little sun
Come to warm me
All summer,
Cares washed away

I look for you
This morning
I look for you
In ice-rimmed leaves
I look for you
Round fields and houses
I look for you
In vain

By the path
A patch of brown
Memories
Of summer heat
I see
Your burnt-out core
The fire’s gone
From your eye

Everywhere I’d go
You’d greet me
Staring
With your flame-rimmed eye
Your little sun
No longer warms me
Fall has come
Winter, nigh

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Note – the pictures of the flowers where taken after the Halloween Nor’easter of 2011.  On October 30, 2011 over 3 foot (about a meter) of wet, heavy snow fell.  This was one of the most damaging storms I’ve seen.  The huge oak in our back yard lost a branch – the branch was bigger than most oak trees, being over a meter in diameter – that’s right, lying on the ground it came up to my waist.  Amazingly there were still Black-eyed Susans around, typically a summer flower.  It was strange seeing their wrecked beauty covered by the snow and ice.  I had already written the song and so i had to take photos of the flowers in the snow.