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Mari Esabel Valverde
Mari Esabel Valverde
Skin
A setting of Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye that addresses themes of healing, resilience, passage, and travel.
for SSAA chorus and piano
A setting of Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “Skin” addresses themes of healing, resilience, passage, and travel. The incessant pulses of the piano create the impression of how time seems to slip away as we strive to grow beyond life’s adversities. A single line is sung twice: “Love means you breathe in two countries.”
Composer’s Notes
“Skin” addresses themes of healing, resilience, passage, and travel. Without mention of any particular name, age, gender, or race, the protagonist “Skin” acknowledges past traumas and ultimately expresses a profound feeling of gratitude “that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves.” Such a notion recalls Maya Angelou’s, that when we know better, we do better. The incessant pulses of the piano create the impression of how an enormous amount of time seems to slip away as we continuously strive to adapt and grow beyond life’s adversities. A single line of text is sung twice, “Love means you breathe in two countries,” in honor of the two worlds indicated in the title of the poem. Through these words Nye suggests that, because we have the capacity to heal, we need not abandon a part of ourselves when we move to nourish another part
of humanity thirsting for life.
Completed in 2020, just before lockdowns initiated on a global scale in response to the imminent spread of COVID-19, “Skin” was finally premièred in 2022 and 2023 by members of a consortium of fourteen treble choruses from across the United States.
-Mari Esabel Valverde
Text
Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers—silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
“Two Countries” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, Copyright © 1995. Used with the permission of the author and Far Corner Books. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
$2.50 per licensed PDF
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