And So 

Music and Text by Caroline Shaw

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Would a song by any other name
sound as sweet and true?
Would all the reds be just the same
or violets as blue?

If you were gone would words still flow
and would they rhyme with you?
If you were gone would I still know
how to love and how to grow
and how the vowel threads through?

And so you say the saying goes
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose is a rose is a tired rhyme,
but in the verse there’s always time.
Would scansion cease to mark the beats
if I went away?

Would a syllable interrupt the feet
of tetrometric ions when I am gone?
Listen and I will sing a tune
of love and life and of the ocean’s prose
and the poetry of a red red rose
that’s newly sprung in June.

And so you say the saying goes
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose is how I’m keeping track of time.

When all the seas rise high my dear
and the rocks melt with the sun,
will the memory of us
still rhyme with anyone?
Will we still tune our violins?
Will we still sing of roses?
Will we exist at all my love,
Or will we fade two stanzas of the dust.
That I suppose is all we were
and all we’ll be.

And so the saying, so it goes,
Depends a lot on if a rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose of a thing sublime.
And so we stay on borrowed time.

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Oceanic from Lunar Songs

Music by Jessie Montgomery

Text by J. Mae Barizo

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Tell me one thing

as we collide, tell me

that your ghost will live 

in a tree or better yet a forest,

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blooming still in any era. That

we will be water one day or air

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pressing down on earth's plates

lapping up life-blood with

our pink and heaving tongues

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Oceanic what was lost

Ice cannot hold back the sea

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All empires end; we're empire

Now. New song; disturb the peace.

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To our children you will be

both past and future: a seed.

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