Wall Cycle
Music by Russell Steinberg
Poetry by Lia Purpura

Wall Cycle is a musical setting of seven poems by Lia Purpura. The poems are almost like haiku. They begin enigmatically just talking about walls separating, comforting, alienating, etc. We're not sure where it’s going. Then the last poem reveals the poet has been thinking about a memorial wall she saw in Poland. It was erected from tombstones that the Nazis had dug up and turned into sidewalks, an ultimate humiliation and erasure of memory. After the war, rabbis went on a painstaking search to uncover these particular slabs in sidewalks and transmute them into a memorial wall outside the synagogue.

Wall Cycle Music Scores

Wall Cycle by Lia Purpura

1. Dear Wall,

double secret

you show us

and show us

that what is out

there is what

here occurs

too.

2. The boy on the balcony

has his own secret.

His matches are hiding.

Wall, see how the window

wants to be like you

but can’t. All day long

it proves, like a photo.

3. At night you mediate

the blue air, the black air.

Where you split, you bloom. We are

tired and lie down, headlong,

in the temple of the right angle

we make to you.

4. No more denying—

desire leaps over, sifts through you

meets up with the scent of spice baking, wine poured

unto which I give thanks

and bless this food, my body,

and you, wall

who join us invisibly.

5. I know there are times

you’ve had enough of our searching

dark knots for familiar faces.

But wall, with you between us

we sleep more easily in strange places.

6. We who grew you from a stone

touch your face so changed by words:

wailing, berlin,

back up against a…

Wall, see everything you stand for?

7. South of Krakow in Kazimierz

circling the synagogue

named for Moses Isserles

stands a high wall of

gravestones that were

gravestones first

then, torn up and walked upon,

sidewalks, now a wall. 

And after many years of searching

on their knees, heads bent close

to the stony smell

the archaeologists of morning

stood up, stood back, saw

you, oh cage with hinges gone

unfolded, outstretched

without a roof and bottomless

set forth in the world

to divide, amaze.