Order of Service – August 27, 2023
What’s in a Poem? Gloucester UU’s Write Poetry
Worship leaders Pat Johnson, Mern Sibley, Andrew Soll
Introduction to the Poetry Service – What’s in a Poem? (Pat Johnson)
Poems I: To everything there is a season
For a Gardener, Dying………………………………………………………………….. Isabel Sloane
Serenity…………………………………………………………. Music and Poem by Charles Ives
Winter Burial………………………………………………………………………………. JoeAnn Hart
Slow March……………………………………………………. Music and Poem by Charles Ives
Alone…………………………………………………………………………………… Karen Ann Myatt
Learning from Miss Lee………………………………. Rufus Collinson (read by Mern Sibley)
Interlude –There’s a Certain Slant of Light……………………………… Dickinson/Robert Baksa
Poems II: What the world needs now
Clear Ice, Small Hurts, Treasures………………………………………………….. Holly Tanguay
Give Me Your Hand……………………………………………………….. Wheelock/John Duke
For Alison……………………………………………… Rufus Collinson (read by Alison Rowell)
There Is a Lane ………………………………………………. Music and Poem by Charles Ives
Teddy’s Blues…………………………………………………………………………….. Diane Faissler
Offering
Offertory – Memories……………………………………………… Music and Poem by Charles Ives
Poems III: Our city of good voyage
En Route from Chichen Itza…………………………….. Jim Seavey (read by Lucille LePage)
All Music, All Delight……………………………………………………….. Nickson/John Duke
Our Lady, Tapdancing on my Piano……………………………………………. Willie Alexander
What’s the Use…………………………………………………………….. Dunbar/Florence Price
Sea Smoke………………………………………………… Rufus Collinson (read by Pat Johnson)
Death of an Old Seaman……………………………………………………. Hughes/Cecil Cohen
Celebrate Gloucester…………………………………… Rufus Collinson (read by Mern Sibley)
Chalice (Mern Sibley)
Benediction (Pat Johnson)
Postlude – He Is There…………………………………………….. Music and Poem by Charles Ives
about the service
In today’s service, we celebrate the gifts of writing that members of our congregation have chosen to share with us. Their skills in crafting words to express concepts, emotions and events are a gift that we all appreciate. Musical interludes between some of the poems are intended to offer another type of expression that complements the spoken poems.
Singing is the oldest way humans have made music. The origin of singing cannot be known but is considered to predate spoken language. The voice was the original musical instrument, used even before sticks hitting stones provided the first percussion instruments. Singing is universal over time, place and culture. Not just entertainment, singing was vital to social, cultural and religious development. As John Koopman said in his history of singing, “Primitive man sings to invoke his gods with prayers and incantations, celebrate his rites of passage with chants and songs, and recount his history and heroics with ballads and epics.” From the time of primitive man to today, song has served these purposes and many more.
Today and throughout history, singing is central to many musical genres – chant, chorale, hymn, chorus, cantata, oratorio, opera, folk, popular, to name but a few. Art song is a type of vocal composition in which one voice is coupled with an instrument, usually piano, to enhance the meaning of a poem or text. Art song developed as part of the Western classical music tradition. It is intended for more intimate recital and concert use, as compared to large scale productions of opera, oratorio or musical theater.
In today’s service, selected art songs are interwoven with the poems written and read by members of our congregation. In this service booklet, the texts of the songs are shown in italics to distinguish them from the poems to be read. All the songs are by 20th century American composers. The poems on which they are based are by poets ranging from 19th century Emily Dickinson to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, of the Harlem Renaissance, to late 20th century poets John Wheelock and Richard Nickson. Ives wrote his own.
I have transcribed the songs, originally for voice and piano, to be organ solos. This might seem a bit untrue to the close relationship between poetry and music in art song. I prefer the think of it as a reversal of the relationship. In art song, poetry is the basic component that is enhanced by the composer’s musical setting. Today, the music is foremost, with the words serving to enhance what the music expresses.
As you listen to the songs during the service, I encourage you to read the poems on which they are based to see how the pure expression of emotion and meaning in music is brought into focus by words. After all, you are the final link in the creative process. The poet writes the words; the composer sets the words to music; the performer interprets the words and music to bring out the meaning and emotion they embody. But you, the listener, are the final link in the cycle of artistic creation. The work of the poet, composer and performer is not complete until you find what is emotional or meaningful to you.
Andrew Soll, organist
Order of Service – August 27, 2023
What’s in a Poem? Gloucester UU’s Write Poetry
Announcements
Prelude
I’ve Heard an Organ Talk Sometimes
Music: Aaron Copland
Poem: Emily Dickinson
I’ve heard an organ talk sometimes
In a cathedral aisle
And understood no word it said
Yet held my breath the while
And risen up and gone away
A more Bernardine girl
And know not what was done to me
In that old hallowed aisle.
Chalice Lighting and Peace Candle
Unison Affirmation
In the light of truth, and the warmth of love,
We gather to seek, to sustain, and to share.
Life is a gift for which we are grateful.
We gather in community to celebrate the
glories and the mysteries of this great gift.
Introduction to the Poetry Service – What’s in a Poem?
Poems I – To Everything There Is a Season
For a Gardener, Dying
Isabel Sloane
Don’t die in the spring
When purest pink and yellow and white
Make Paradise of everything.
Don’t die in June,
When peonies are at their full:
That would be too soon.
Don’t go in the bright fall
When orange maples make the sky
Most brilliant blue of all –
Nor in the frozen winter,
When biting cold winds bring
Intense desire for spring.
But leave us, lonely, in November,
When beauty’s old and worn and dying,
And there’s nothing much for which to hope,
But only to remember.
Serenity
Music and Poem: Charles Ives
O, Sabbath rest of Galilee! Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
O, calm of hills above, Till all our strivings cease:
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee Take from our souls the strain and stress,
The silence of eternity And let our ordered lives confess,
Interpreted by love. The beauty of thy peace.
Winter Burial
JoeAnn Hart
He met her at the gate with the cart The ground opened in March,
and she covered the animal with a sheet. a sudden, violent thaw.
They pulled together to the place They peeled away wet leaves made dark by time.
behind the barn. The shovels cut through fibrous roots
The ground was frozen. like matted fur.
They laid their friend on the hard earth Runners hard as shins were severed.
adjusting his head, his yellowed horns The water table was high.
ridged with years. Life coursed beneath their feet.
She tucked the sheet around him, They remove the stones
collecting his dignity. then the black box, letting it fall aside.
It’s a dirty business The body was fresh
storing a body for the winter. as if they just found him lifeless in the barn,
They carried the black box the morning sun a shaft of dusty light.
and covered him, Worn hooves and gloved hands met
Then stacked heavy stones on that for the unseemly haul to the pit
against the predators. which swallowed him whole.
Snow was coming. Then relief. He is where he was meant to be.
They might not see the box for a long while. She tilted his horns to display his glory,
Say a prayer, he said. and said a prayer.
I have no words. God.
Write a poem then, later. Nothing else came.
I don’t write poetry, she said.
You will, he said.
When the hole was filled
they went to the shed for rakes
to smooth over what had been done.
On return, a goat was standing on the grave
staring down, comprehending,
or not,
as his friend got ready to do
the hard work of becoming one
with the land.
Slow March
Music and Poem: Charles Ives
One evening just at sunset
We laid him in the grave;
Although a humble animal
His heart was true and brave.
All the family joined us,
In solemn march and slow,
From the garden place beneath the trees
Where the sunflowers grow.
Alone (1972)
Karen Ann Myatt
With friends, I am alone.
But Alone, I am all.
To hear the creaking of my bones at rest,
So brittle as I fall.
Deep dark in the night I awaken
To hear each solitary breath,
Escaping from the world outside that
Shuns the thought of death.
Alone in silence,
So simple a thing,
Though it frightens them to hear,
Alone is where I choose to be.
The thought
Too much
To bear.
And friends, they don’t mean unAlone,
Though it seems so from outside.
Friends,
Unfriends.
Hypocrites,
Idiots.
Alone is where I hide!
Learning from Miss Lee
Rufus Collinson
read by Mern Sibley
For Virginia Lee, West Parish School
When you were talking today
about seeing the landscape,
dreaming up exercises for teachers
to help children see,
I thought of the time my first grade teacher
Miss Lee –
my first true hero
who died when I was in fifth grade
of a brain tumor –
took us out to the pond behind the school.
It seemed blissful to leave the corridors behind,
to step into the blossoming air,
swinging giant tin cans on string handles,
to see mud on Miss Lee’s knees
as she showed us how to cast our buckets out
and drag in a load of pond.
Back in the classroom,
she dipped a dropper into the bog
we’d fetched and gently squeezed a tiny plop
the size of a tear onto a mirrored slide.
One by one, we stepped up to the microscope
and had a look.
My eye filled with a world
of swarming swimming things,
alive alive alive.
I wanted to never stop watching
the lives I never knew existed
and I have never stopped believing
in the infinity of Virginia Lee
and the secret inhabitants
of everything I see.
Interlude – Music on a Season
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
Music: Robert Baksa
Poem: Emily Dickinson
There’s a certain slant of light on winter afternoons,
that oppresses, like the weight of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us; we can find no scar,
but internal diff’rence where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything, ’tis the seal despair,
an imperial affliction sent us of the air.
When it comes the landscape listens, shadows hold their breath;
when it goes, ’tis like the distance on the look of death.
Poems II – What the World Needs Now
Clear Ice
Holly Tanguay
Winterbound and used to lingering night
The yearling doe steps out, head down,
Seeking the smell of not quite frozen ground.
Then in the clear she stands and measures time
Warming herself on a view of the coming dawn.
All that she remembers was like this:
Grazing through silent meadows in the dark,
Bedding under hemlocks in the day,
The scant snow melted round her for a space.
She has forgotten tender grass,
And the feeling of strong sun along her back
But not the beauty of water running
Under clear ice or the taste of winter buds
Spiraled tight to last against the frost.
Into the still cold clearing comes a buck.
The doe, so long a solitary seer, is seen
And quickens to a vision of bounding herds
On soft earth.
Breathing vapor in the chill,
Transforming the meadow with their twoness,
Together, they compound the growing light.
Small Hurts
Holly Tanguay
“Oh love,” I say aloud
Though you’re not here.
You are always beyond my finding now,
But the small hurts of caring for you linger on my hands.
A pink line burned on the back of one,
From checking the baked custard you couldn’t eat.
A swollen place between the knuckles on the other
Still hurts when I grip tight.
Was it from clasping the cloth beneath you
To raise you in the bed
Or later from moving things back
To where your bed had been?
You are gone from my sight
Like your old car from the drive,
But these small hurts remain.
You are not yet gone from my hands.
Treasures
Holly Tanguay
Verses I wrote to you before we wed, decades ago,
Found among your treasures
In the bottom of your dresser drawer.
Not once in all the intervening years did I pen poetry for you.
Loved, known, held in the universe of us
There was no need.
Now the verses come again,
Voice of a yearning kindled by your loss.
Loss of you, the one I love,
But not of the love itself.
That is safe among my treasures
In the bottom of my heart.
Give Me Your Hand
Music: John Duke
Poem: John Hall Wheelock
Give me your hand Oh, the long way
By these grey waters We two have come,
The day is ending. In joy together,
Already the first To these grey shores
Faint star pierces the veil of heaven. And quiet waters
And the day’s ending.
The day is ending
The journey is ended.
Give me your hand.
For Alison
Rufus Collinson
read by Alison Rowell
We will always remember
the two of you
at coffee hour.
We will remember
entering the circle
of your Love.
Steve, nodding and smiling,
always grateful.
And you, standing by,
noticing Everything,
shining and tender and strong.
And now,
moving from that sacred place,
we will carry on this Love
Together.
There Is a Lane
Music and Poem: Charles Ives
There is a lane which winds towards the bay There, summer evenings of days long past,
Passing a wood where the little children play; Learned I a love song, and my heart still holds it fast!
Teddy’s Blues
Diane Faissler
oh sweet mama how I die for you
dontchaknow?
my life is endless hunger
defined by your comings and goings
your I’ll be back
your I’m home
stay with me, only me
I’ll teach you all you need to know
how to pine sweetly and beg politely (or not)
live the moment and bestow devotion
am I not irresistible?
eyes only for you
all the rest is blankie stuff
forgive me the gnawed slippers
stolen napkins cookies begged
those sops don’t touch my loneliness
only make my jaws ache
with wanting you more
stay, mama, stay
don’t talk to me if all you can say is
byebye
beback
my nose won’t leave the floor
Offering
Offertory – Music on Love and Nostalgia
Memories
Music and Poem: Charles Ives
We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house;
We’re waiting for the curtain to a-rise with wonders for our eyes;
We’re feeling pretty gay, and well we may,
“O, Jimmy, look!” I say, “The band is tuning up and soon will start to play.”
We whistle and we hum, beat time with the drum. (whistle).
We whistle and we hum, beat time with the drum, (whistle)
We’re sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house, awaiting for the curtain to rise with wonders for our eyes, a feeling of expectancy, a certain kind of ecstasy, expectancy and ecstasy, expectancy and ecstasy Shsss…………..
Curtain!
From the street a strain on my ear doth fall,
A tune as thread-bare as that “old red shawl,”
It is tattered, it is torn, it shows signs of being worn,
It’s the tune my Uncle hummed from early morn,
‘Twas a common little thing and kind’a sweet,
But ’twas sad and seemed to slow up both his feet;
I can see him shuffling down to the barn or to the town, a humming.
Poems III – Our city of Good Voyage
En Route from Chichen Itza (1988)
Jim Seavey
read by Lucille LePage
Old roads seem the same, no matter the ground
or vegetation growing over, with dried ruts
and rusting junk in random spots alongside.
We push ahead in the heat to flee mosquitoes,
with, this trip, no jungle ruin at the end.
We talk about our children, your parents, their
forty years of his need to be believed, hers
to be understood. You walk ahead,
or I, or side by side, met here in the middle
of a rare week apart. There is a
slight dampness to our skin (like
a memory of lovemaking) in this oppressive
air, unusual in these New Hampshire hills.
We duck under a fallen tree, walk on to find,
on the uphill side, a sunken well,
worn down through glacial fragments –
like the sandstone wells of Chichen Itza,
we agree – less likely to have human skeletons below.
Though here, it’s hard to tell what deeds
long winter hides, or what spring demands.
Today there’s no rime on the mountains, invisible
in the mist. On the back porch of the guest house,
munching fruit and cheese, chatting with passers,
we hang on the edge of the world, nothing to exhume.
All Music, All Delight
Music: John Duke
Poem: Richard Nickson
We were lone wanderers passing by No more we wandered
A wide wood under a wider sky. Then that night,
over us twilight loomed as still Who found all music,
As the tall cedar on the dark hill. All delight
Wound in the silence
We saw no other Where we stood,
Thing at all Hushed as the shadows,
Than deepening shadows Still as the wood.
At night fall.
We heard no other sound than this:
Two soft murmurs
One light kiss.
Our Lady
Willie Alexander
I walk up Portagee Hill i see our lady of good v
I look up to her because she looks down to me (repeat )
I’m the greasy pole champ i got money in the bank
I don’t shoot heroin I don’t fight with anyone
I’m eating my spaghetti one strand at a time
I’m not waiting at the Waiting Station, waiting in line (repeat )
Tapdancing on my Piano
Willie Alexander
Tapdancing on my piano
I began to realize what a few sharps & flats could do
how good an arpeggio could be
tapdancing on my piano i could see the ocean, hear the world famous
non stop seagull opera
watch the songs float in ( there goes a good one )!!!
Tapdancing on my piano
i could feel the boogie woogie in my toes !!!
feel the chinese chords in my feet
hear the arhythmical final blues
tapdancing on my piano
What’s the Use
Music: Florence B. Price
Poem: Paul Laurence Dunbar
What’s the use o’ folks a-frown-in’
When the way’s a little rough?
Frowns lay out the road for smilin’.
You’ll be wrinkled soon enough.
What’s the use?
What’s the use o’ folks a-sigh-in’?
It’s an awful waste o’ breath.
Oh An’ a body can’t start awastin’
What he needs so bad in death. What’s the use?
What’s the use o’ even weepin’?
Might as well go ‘long an’ smile.
Life, our longest, strongest arrow
Only lasts a little while.
So what’s the use?
Sea Smoke
Rufus Collinson
read by Pat Johnson
We awaken in the cold this morning
to find that the sea has become enchanted
and is rising to the sky.
Gulls shine all prismy within the mist
and ultimately lift up too,
wings becoming light.
Everything is rising.
Even on the hardest day,
there is transformation.
Death of an Old Seaman
Music: Cecil Cohen
Poem: Langston Hughes
We buried him high on a windy hill,
But his soul went out to sea,
I know for I heard when all was still,
His sea soul said to me:
“Put no tombstone at my head,
For here I do not make my bed.
Strew no flowers on my grave;
I’ve gone back to the wind and wave.
Weep not, weep not, weep not for me,
for I am happy, happy with my sea!
Celebrate Gloucester
Rufus Collinson
read by Mern Sibley
Let us go to a high place and look out.
Gulls soar and drift like our spirits.
Trees reach out and spread their dapple and their shade.
Small birds twitter in droves like the beauty of our distractions.
Hills emerge and rocks lounge like beached whales.
The land curves and the sands glisten.
We see everything that keeps and holds, encloses
Coves, forts, quarries, cellars, the bell tower, breakwater
Harbor ramps and wharves and pilings, hulls and masts and lines
Vessels of pleasure and provision
Rooftops, widow walks, chimneys
The language and history of the neighborhoods
The salt of our current lives
We dwell in the spirit of all that swells and beckons and provides
The shining harbor
Steeples, light houses, Our Lady of Good Voyage
Our Man at the Wheel
Coffee shops, bars, restaurants
The aroma of the nations
The endless call of the sea and promise of the horizon
The spirit of Gloucester surrounds and teaches us
How to create Love from Loss
How to look far out and find the possibilities within
How to live close and always see the distant horizon
Celebrate Gloucester and your self
All that you have become
Within the shining city of your soul.
Unison Extinguishing of the Chalice
We extinguish this flame but not the light of truth,
the warmth of community,
or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts until we are together again
Benediction
Blessing the Boats
Lucille Clifton
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind, then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back. may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this, to that.
Postlude
He Is There
Music and Poem: Charles Ives
Verse 1:
Fifteen years ago today
A little Yankee, little yankee boy
Marched beside his granddaddy
In the decoration day parade
The village band would play those old war tunes, and the G. A. R. would shout,
“Hip Hip Hooray!” in the same old way,
As it sounded on the old camp ground.
Verse 2:
Fifteen years ago today
A little Yankee, with a German name
Heard the tale of “forty eight”
Why his Granddaddy joined Uncle Sam,
His fathers fought that medieval stuff and he will fight it now,
“Hip Hip Hooray! this is the day.”
When he’ll finish up that aged job.
Verse 3:
There’s a time in ev’ry life,
When it’s do or die,
And our yankee boy
Does his bit that we may live,
In a world where all may have a “say.”
He’s conscious always of his country’s aim which is Liberty for all,
“Hip Hip Hooray!” is all he’ll say,
As he marches to the Flanders front.
Chorus:
That boy has sailed o’er the ocean,
He is there, he is there, he is there.
He’s fighting for the right, but when it comes to might,
He is there, he is there, he is there;
As the Allies beat up all the warlords!
He’ll be there, he’ll be there, and then the world will shout the Battle cry of Freedom
Tenting on a new camp ground.
Tenting to-night
Tenting on a new camp ground
For it’s rally round the Flag boys Rally once a-gain,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.
The Gloucester UU Church (formerly the Independent Christian Church, Unitarian Universalist,) has the distinction of being the first Universalist church in America. Brought to Gloucester from England by John Murray, Universalism is founded on the belief that God wills the salvation of all, emphasizing the inherent goodness of human beings. With Murray as leader, several members of the First Parish Church separated from that body on January 1, 1779 and formed the Independent Church of Christ. The church received its charter in 1785; in 1786 Gloucester Universalists fought for and won freedom from taxation for the support of the First Parish Church. The ruling in their favor by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court provided a precedent for the separation of church and state.
The cornerstone for the current building was laid in 1805. In 1961 the Universalist Church of America and the American Unitarian Association merged to create the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the Independent Christian Church voted to be part of this union and became a Unitarian Universalist Church.
Today our congregation remains committed to spiritual exploration and growth, social transformation, and care of our community and the natural world. We are a Welcoming Congregation, fully affirming the inclusion of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. In 2004, our congregation adopted the following mission statement:
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we gather in a spirit of joy to celebrate community and the gifts of each individual. We seek to be guided by love, welcoming those of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, age, gender, physical or mental ability, and sexual identity. We honor freedom of thought. We seek spiritual guidance and inspiration. We support spiritual inquiry. We strive to put our ideas into our deeds and to work for justice and peace.
GLOUCESTER UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
Organized as The Independent Christian Church in 1779
10 Church Street, Gloucester, Massachusetts 01930
Telephone (978) 283-3410
Website: www.gloucesteruu.org
E-Mail: info@gloucesteruu.org
Reverend Janet Parsons, Minister
Anthony Curcuru, Sexton
Susan Taormina, Choir Director
Steve Lacey, Music Coordinator
Kiana DuBose, Children’s Programming
Christine Norris, Administrator
Wendy Fitting, Minister Emeritus
Pat Johnson, President, Board of Trustees, 2024
Rev. Parsons’ office hours are by appointment.
rev.janetparsons@gmail.com
