This group of songs is named after a collection of poetry by contemporary Australian poet Maria Zajkowski, and it is from this collection that all the text is drawn. I was attracted to Maria's poetry because I found it so striking. Her work is spare, detached, taut with restraint, but spiked with devastating releases of feeling which can make your stomach drop, as if you are suddenly in free fall. And the poems stay with you; they have a way of getting under your skin and leaving you unsettled, haunted. With Maria's very generous permission, I have set six of her poems as songs for eight voices and percussion, especially for Roomful of Teeth.

what we began
when we began we began
I sent myself back but we never
did look into that cloud
there is too much desire to forget
what a waste we can and can’t be
tonight apart looks like
what won’t be itself in the light

are we death
are we death now
can we hope at last
that this blue morning has become us
finally is there nothing to believe
coming after us
placing its steps in ours through the dew
free of the urging heart
free of the curse of hair and eyes
are we at last on the mountain
we have so long been under
the tunnel that was a song
is it over
the irritability of being ourselves
the plain fact of being dumb
are we at last over it
can we now be final
final like memory
final like stars
final like mornings
all over again 

surviving death                    
Every day, surviving death, we send out our horses.
They don’t come back.

Here the dry river’s a place not to camp,
the night a place not to be.

An army gathers rattling its pans, thinking of home,
an army that will turn your head

to a fire in the sand where those
who've survived this wait out of time

in the dust and the gold,
with the horse you thought was gone.

Text by Maria Zajkowski