Voyager Dust (from Longing for Home) – Carol Barnett

Composer: Carol Barnett

Text by: Mohja Kahf (b. 1967)

Instrumentation mezzo-soprano,, piano

Duration: approx. 3'30"

Date Written:  2018

Composer’s note: Longing for Home is a song cycle written to celebrate Source Song Festival’s fifth season. The texts all reference homecoming in various ways – the enduring wish to return to a place remembered with love and longing, as well as the uncertainty, the impossibility of doing so.

“Voyager dust” is the essence of the home we carry with us, instantly recognizable by other voyagers. What a wonderful opportunity to write a musical evocation of places as far away as Beijing, Guangzhou, Damascus, Aleppo, and the challenge of creating the scene of lighthearted children’s play – running underneath a canopy of wet scarves, feeling the spray of water as they are shaken out – and then to contrast that with the somber realization that the poet is in exile, unlikely to return home anytime soon. Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor. 

The full cycle can be found here: https://opusimprints.com/products/longing-for-home-carol-barnett

text

VOYAGER DUST

When they arrive in the new country,
voyagers carry it on their shoulders,
the dusting of the sky they left behind.
The woman on the bus in the downy sweater,
I could smell it in her clothes.
It was voyager’s dust from China.
It lay in the foreign stitching of her placket.
It said: We will meet again in Beijing,
in Guangzhou. We will meet again.
My mother had voyager’s dust in her scarves.
I imagine her a new student like this woman on the bus,
getting home, shaking out the clothes from her suitcase,
hanging up, one by one, the garments from the old country.
On washing day my mother would unroll her scarves.
She’d hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we’d stretch the wet georgette and shake it out.
We’d dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizen driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust. It said:
We will meet again in Damascus,
in Aleppo. We will meet again.
It was Syria in her scarves.
We never knew it.
Now it is on our shoulders too.

Mohja Kahf (b. 1967)