Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Rumi, Walt Whitman and Liberal Arts Professor Lin Haire-Sargeant!
On Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23 at 8 pm, choreographer Beth Soll will present her Beth Soll & Company, an ensemble of dancers and musicians, in Dances of Passion and Peace, A Concert of New Dance, Music, and Poetry.
Poems by Robert Frost, Lin Haire-Sargeant, Langston Hughes, Rumi, and Walt Whitman will be recited in English, French, Catalan, German, French, and American Sign Language.Lighting Designer James Kolditz will illuminate the events.
Lin Haire-Sargeant’s poem. Old Heat, appears below.
Old Heat
Lin Haire-Sargeant
Back then, in the summer,
The world was closer to the sun.
It blazed deep into black earth
It rasped our clover lawns to brown
It crisped the backs of our necks and the tops of our ears.
Even deep in cottonwood groves, the hot shade glowed.
Indoors, the heat settled in dense blocks
Unbudging behind sullen drawn blinds.
Our fleshly bodies sagged beneath the weight.
In summer, then, we didn’t have a fan
On the third straight one hundred-topping day
My mother called us in and ran cold water
Until it turned her testing finger numb.
Then she soaked clean sheets in the tub,
Smoothed them sopping on the linoleum floor.
We stretched out in our nylon slips
Otherwise worn unseen under Sunday dresses.
My mother read soothing icy books out loud–
The Snow Queen, The Long Winter, until
The air above us seemed to swirl with snow.
As the slick cold spread through my skin
And the wet sheets lapped against my sides
I could almost remember being a whale in the Arctic
Sliding my flank along a huge blue wall of under-ocean ice.
That night, through the window black above my bed
I saw the trembling mystery of the heat
make dull flashes. I knew the world would end.
When lightning finally ripped, the rain
felt like a last chance to those left on earth.
Live again, it said, but know
that heat is all, and the source of all,
And will return.