Hawk Hour

For soprano and piano. Duration - 8-10 minutes.
Poetry by Illinois Poet Laureate Mark Turcotte.

Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe), is the current Illinois Poet Laureate and longtime resident of Chicago. This poem highlights the alienation from nature people experience in a bustling, noisy, dirty city. His writing vividly paints the sights and sounds of a morning rush – city dwellers can perhaps also imagine the smells. As a former resident of the neighborhood of Rogers Park, these locales are intimately familiar to me, as are the fleeting glimpses of natural world – the Lake down the street, and a hawk hovering in the breeze.

Commissioned by Ear Taxi Festival 2025 for its Composer Showcase.

Hawk Hour

In this city time unwinds in unnatural ways. It doesn’t fly. It trips. It passes in coughing fits. It doesn’t have enough soul to tick tock tick. It spits and spews under the rusty fenders of all these cars going nowhere fast. It’s bad for the body. Even here at the corner of Sheridan and Pratt, the lake and its waves only a block away, I cannot measure my own dying. Instead, this taxi pants at the traffic light. Instead, this bus, the Outer Drive Express, lodges in my ventricle. Instead, this city breaks my clock.

On my good leg I wobble between the I-pods wearing all those heads, wearing the same 2.8 million faces. Some idiot calls this a river of humanity but rivers don’t move like this. It’s not natural. I stagger past the café that wasn’t here yesterday, won’t be here tomorrow. Past the liquor store that will be here forever, lubricating the gears and all their broken teeth. I lurch past the rows of trees. Gnarled sticks attacked by choking leaves. I pause near the playlot, listen to the skippers and skaters sing, the city is a meadow and the people are the sheep, the city is a meadow and the people are the sheep. I grin. Below the Red Line tracks a squad car screams up against the wall to people already up against the wall. I give away a dollar to a man who says, god bless, cuz he does not know god has nothing to do with my dollar.

In Loyola Station I give more money to the turnstile. It says nothing as I catch the current. I crawl up the escalator, 90 miles per hour, swivel to the end of the platform at 95. There I linger in a shadow that drapes itself across my eyes. I catch my breath, I stand upright. Above me the shape of a hawk drowns out the rush of the next ten trains and with its beating wings reaches out to stop the sky.

Sabrina Langois, soprano; Brent Funderburk, piano
Ear Taxi Festival 2025, Chicago