I was asked to make a setting of this poem by my Iranian-born friend, the artist Jila Peacock, with whom I have collaborated several times in the past, including setting her beautiful translations of poems by the 14th century Persian poet Hafez.

She writes:

I have always loved Dickinson’s poems. They seem to come from some ecstatic centre in her being and remind me of the work of Hafez. As with Persian poetry, she eschews punctuation, which gives her words a raw, unbound, wild intension.

Jila is a singer herself, and was looking for something new to learn during the lockdown of 2020. The song is designed to be performable alone, using a drone as an anchor for a very simple setting. The text seems particularly apt in the bewildering context of a worldwide pandemic.

The exchange for my work was one of her shape poems’ a horse created from the Farsi script of a poem by Hafez.

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