Near Odessa – Carol Barnett

Composer: Carol Barnett

Text by: Patricia Kirkpatrick

Instrumentation: SSAA and piano

Duration: Approx. 4:00 minutes

Date Written:  2013

Composer’s note: The piano carries us along while the voices paint the scenes, from birdsong to gentle wind, from boarded-up storefronts to wheat ready for harvest, encapsulating both the simplicity and the enduring beauty of the everyday images in Patricia Kirkpatrick’s poem about journeying through rural western Minnesota.

"Near Odessa" was written for Bella Voce, a women's choir based in Reno, Nevada, and conducted by Jennifer Tibben. The poem is from a recent volume by Minneapolis writer Patricia Kirkpatrick, written during a time when she was making frequent car trips through the western Minnesota landscape to the tiny town of Odessa. The images of golden fields, clattering harvest machinery, the far-off cry of geese, the hum of tires on the highway and the waves on the river, all are fodder for sound pictures.
– Carol Barnett

text

Near the end of summer.
Wheatfield with lark. With swift,
longspur, and sparrow. I see the birds
opening tails and wings
above grasses
and hidden nests.
Soybeans with bells, yellowing, green
tassels of corn, geese
again and again.
I see the birds
but wind takes all the sound.
Small towns are reduced to chains or storefronts,
boarded-up.
Almost to the river called a lake, grey stones of water,
dammed, white-capped, hinge
between states.
Some fields are so gold they seem to be singing.
The gold fields lie down, flat but not empty,
and will be harvested later with blades.
Near Odessa
I come to a place where the end is beginning.
Where the light is absolute, it rises.

– Patricia Kirkpatrick (Odessa)