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Carol Barnett
Carol Barnett (Beady Eyes)
Dancing Toward the Promised Land (from Longing for Home)
Miriam’s impatiently joyful finger cymbals and tambourine urge the Israelites out of Egypt to begin the long journey home to the Promised Land.
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Longing for Home
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Jerusalem
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Mother
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Voyager Dust
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A Letter to Marianne Moore
mezzo-soprano, piano
from the cycle Longing for Home
What a wonderful musical challenge: to contrast Miriam’s impatient tambourine with the ponderous movement of a massive nation of slaves out of Egypt and on the way to the Promised Land.
Composer’s Notes
Poet and prose writer Alla Reneé Bozarth was among the first eleven women ordained as Episcopal priests in 1974 in Philadelphia. She has over forty years of professional experience as a soul caregiver—soul-mending as a psychotherapist and soul-tending as a spiritual director.
Ranging freely across the centuries, Miriam, sister of Moses, remembers her younger self leading the way out of Egypt with her dances and songs, and imagining what it will be like to enter the Promised Land. But Miriam never did reach the Promised Land, and the poet is writing many centuries later. How powerfully historical events still influence us, and how strong is the urge to return to the promised land of home.
Text
Dancing Toward the Promised Land
I, Miriam, took my tambourine
and finger cymbals with me
out of the land of slavery
with its daily insults and petty
exemptions, and so remain always
ready to dance on the long, long journey,
dance at every victory, beginning with
surviving the Passover, then the strange
occurrence when the Red Sea dried beneath
our feet as we ran, safely passing over the narrow
strip onto the Sinai Peninsula, all the way out
from the land of longing toward the storied memory of Home.
I danced to the song that spilled out of me,
loud up to Heaven, rejoicing on hopeful feet,
rejoicing with arms flying through warm air like wings.
God knows it may take a long time to return.
It’s been five hundred years, after all.
A long time gone, but our stories keep it alive
in our hearts. I wonder if I’ll live to see it from
the mountains across River Jordan. I wonder
if I’ll be an old woman, and dance down
the side of Mt. Nebo with arms wide open,
heart fluttering strong, leading the way
with cymbals and songs into the Promised Land.
This poem is in the unpublished book, My Blessed Misfortunes, by Alla Renée Bozarth,
Copyright 2011. All rights reserved.
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