Stuart Beatch: My Mother's Body

Sep. 19, 2020 at 12:40 p.m. MDT

My Mother's Body, composed by Stuart Beatch, August 2020, for Pro Coro Canada

Practice Tracks:
Soprano | Alto | Tenor | Bass


My Mother’s Body

Poem by Zara Neukom


Ravens lift, weightless in the updraft
snow dusts clay like flour on a stone surface.

My mother, white-haired goddess on thin legs
watches the wind-players and laughs with them.

I watch my mother watch the birds. Her soft eyes fall
and lift again. She was sick for a year a year I wasn’t home.


When the organ of your body that is programed to give life turns
against you, how do you still say woman?


I was drinking in a hostel half way across the world. I remember I had 3 minutes of Internet left

when I opened the email with a picture of my mother with cloth for hair. My dad shaved his beard. I cried

in a room full of faces I didn’t know.


A flock of ravens is called unkindness.

I’m watching them in the lines of my mother’s body

and it seems impossible to believe
in bad omens. She steps on frozen

sage. And for a minute laughing
feels like floating