Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World

Sept 2024. SATB, Treble Chorus or Solo, Piano and Violin / 5:20

Choral music has the unique power to heal, and this piece provides a gorgeous, necessary vehicle for collective processing. Responding directly to the tragedies of gun violence, this anthem for choir, piano, and violin consciously avoids despair, turning grief into an incandescent, unifying wave of hope where bullets metaphorically become bells. It carries a massive, unforgettable emotional payload.

As the bell rings, the choir sings: I was born of bullets, but now I sing of a world where bullets melt into bells. As the congregation meets, they raise their heads as if to say: Melt the cannons into bells, melt the bullets into bells.

This stark and beautiful setting flows into a moving call for unity and action.

The poem was written for the community of Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty students and six educators lost their lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, on December 14, 2012.

Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World by Martín Espada

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.

Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:

Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins

of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,

and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born

in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing

of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell

in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War

sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate

and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke

form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,

but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,

a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,

the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.

Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:

Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.

Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:

Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.