Keeping Time for Joy

Program Notes:

Commissioned by Peterborough Voices for the Peterborough International Women’s Choral Festival 2023.

Text:

Leave your labours, short and long
Your love, and loss, and longing strong
Into the blue, arise anew
As summer’s swifts and swallows throng

Take wing, embrace infinity
Through paths unwritten, flying free
Once subdued, become renewed
Awake your wintering self, and be!

Keeping time for joy, oh joy! Keeping time for joy

In willing winds together dwell
On feathers fine, we swoop and swell
Wayward winging, softly singing
To the earth, for now, farewell

Keeping time for joy, oh joy! Keeping time for joy

With the lengthening of the light
We gently swirl, through paling bright
In colours vast, descend at last
Our wistful hearts fulfilled by flight

Surrendered to our rightful rest
Wings weary, whisper at our breasts
Of joys to seek, and find, and keep
As a soaring song sings in our chests

Keeping time for joy, oh joy! Keeping time for joy

Text Source

Sarah Windle (b. 1985)