Song of the Exiles
May 2024. SATB and Piano / 4:20
SATB and Piano
This piece explores an aspect of the immigrant experience: the pain not just of leaving behind one’s homeland, but the blame faced by later generations for leaving that homeland behind. It does not matter that “there never was a garden” — or that life in that land was never the experience dreamt of by those who never got to experience that home.
The Karakachani (as they are called in Bulgaria) are a nomadic tribe of mysterious origin who traveled across the Balkans and were most closely affiliated with the Pindus and Rhodope mountain ranges. Their movement and their rough and inaccessible habitats kept them isolated from other groups.
Because of their rootless, temporary existence, little of Karakachan culture remains and we know almost nothing about their history; however, a number of their songs were collected by ethnographers in the 1930s, and Holly Karapetkova used these songs as inspiration for Song of the Exiles and other poems. The poems are not translations, but rather draw from the images of the songs and re-inscribe them in a new form. From Towline by Holly Karapetkova (Oregon, Cloudbank Books, 2016), copyright 2016 by Holly Karapetkova.
Song of the Exiles by Holly Karapetkova
There never was a garden
only a leaving:
miles and miles
of footprints in the dirt.
In the beginning--
the shattered sun, the wind,
and nothing left but our shadows
sifting through the dust behind us.
When we turned
we did not turn to salt.
When we turned
there was nothing behind us to burn,
nothing to return to,
though who could blame us for turning
with only the long days ahead,
tongues tripping in the dirt.
They said we didn't belong.
They blamed us
for leaving the garden
which never was or would be.
Where could we go,
we who had come from nowhere
and hence could not
return?