From last Sunday’s New York Times:

“When I think of the soul of the nation,” Joy Harjo, the United States poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, said, “I think of the process of becoming, and what it is we want to become. That is where … we have reached a stalemate. What do people want to become?”

“It is like everything is broken at once,” she said. “We are at a point of great wounding, where everyone is standing and looking within themselves and each other.”

What next? Shall the soul of the nation be soothed?

“Who Shall Soothe?” is my setting of Walt Whitman’s great question.

Observing the brokenness, the delirium and the ceaseless fractiousness of humanity, unflinching yet pitying us like a loving, hovering father as we “darken and daze ourselves,” he asks,

“Who shall soothe these feverish children?”

He posits a transcendent answer: the notion of God.

Then, speaking for all of us, he asks another arresting question: how long we must await this divine soothing?.

“We can wait no longer,” he concludes ironically, knowing we have no choice but to wait.

Here are the lyrics, extracted from Whitman’s last long poem, “Passage to India” :

“Who shall soothe these fev’rish children?
(repeated mournfully and with increased yearning and intensity)
Who shall soothe these children?
Who shall soothe them?

O, Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes,
Thou center of them,
Thou mightier center of the true, the good and the loving.

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovel’d long enough, eating and drinking like brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves long enough?

O, we can wait no longer.
Who shall soothe these fev’rish children?
We can wait no longer.”

To hear “Who Shall Soothe” sung by the October Festival Choir under the direction of Chris Miller, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.