Winter 2025 Spoken Word
In addition to song, each season our program committee curates poetry and spoken word pieces that enhance or explain our songs, offer a glimpse into members’ lives, or simply give us a moment of peace.
“You are never alone in the night.
The same stars that guided your grandmothers shine over you now.
Rest easy, beloved—
you are held in a lineage of light.”
“You are a splinter of the absolute!
Shatterling, cosmite, star-stuff.
Divine awareness granted singularity
And made lonely in teeming selfness.
So rejoice!
When you kick a table leg, it is with our toe;
When your face splits in joy, we grin also;
And when your solo shines, your light joins the celestial choir.”
“The very existence of great stories and stirring music and good art is a sermon itself. That anyone at all in the world would set their sad heart and tired hands to the work of wreaking beauty out of chaos is a monument to Grace. It reminds us of light and high beauty, and it laments the world’s great sorrow. It gives the heart language to rejoice and language to mourn.”
“When the sun goes down
And the sky of our little blue planet
Falls dark
You can count the stars and see why
Our ancestors
Thought the gods lived among them.”
“Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.
Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fires and the flood.
Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end,
There were such precious times between,
In which everything was radiant
And we loved, again, this world.”
“I had a choice: I could either let the darkness of the world swallow me, or l could do what I could to help make the world a little bit brighter.”
“When the light around you lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn
Cold and stone inside,
When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself
And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,
When one voice commands
Your whole heart
And it is raven dark,
Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world,
Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,
Know that you are not alone
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.
Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.
Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark.
That is all you need
To nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.
A new confidence will come alive
To urge you toward lighter ground
Where your imagination
Will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!”
“Hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the danger that exists, but it is not stopped by them. There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light.”
