songs

I recently recorded some songs with Lucas a friend of mine. We have since been writing more original songs but in our one recording session, we recorded six songs total, five covers, one original.

#41 by dave matthews
the trapeze swinger by iron and wine
hallelujah by leonard cohen
sideways by citizen cope and santana
older chests by damien rice
the melodies by david barron and lucas eason

You can download a .zip file with the six songs at the following link:

click me

Any criticism would be appreciated.

commentary on "planting a sequoia" (see below for the poem itself)

Dana Gidia’s poem “Planting a Sequoia” is a sweepingly beautiful and aching story of a man planting a tree after the death of his son. The speaker is planting a sequoia tree in remembrance and honor of his recently deceased son; the poem itself is told as if the writer were the speaker, in the first person point of view. Throughout the poem, the author compares the tree and the son in order to show the reader why planting this tree is so important to the speaker. The tree itself acts as a symbol of the child and as a sign of hope. Gidia also utilizes several time elements throughout the poem as well in order to show how long he hopes this tree will stand and act as a memorial to his dead son. Lastly, the author uses diction to create both a somber mood of mourning and a sense of hope for the future of the tree.

All the way throughout the poem, Gidia compares the new sequoia tree with his dead baby boy. The writer describes planting the tree, “wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord. / All that remains above earth of a first-born son.” This serves to show the reader that the boy has recently died and also to show that the tree is being planted in remembrance of the son. By planting the tree and infusing “a few stray atoms brought back to the elements” into the tree (that is, the only part of his son left “above earth”), the speaker is letting his son live through the tree and giving him a means of surviving after death. The speaker tells how he will care for the tree, “giv[ing] you what we can—our labor and our soil/Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,” further reinforcing the notion that the tree has become and will continue to act as a surrogate for the child. The use of consonance through the repetition of the ‘s’ sound in the sentence “nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees… /A slender shoot against the sunset” sounds smooth and easy to the reader’s ears. This consonance shows the smooth transition the speaker has made to help the tree grow. He will “give it what he can” and do all he that is in his power to make sure the tree grows and is prosperous.

The tree itself acts as a symbol and a stand-in for the dead son, both for the speaker and for the reader. The first stanza describes the planting of the tree, almost making it sound like a burial: “All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, / Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.” By using apostrophe and speaking directly to the tree, the speaker confuses the reader in making him think that he is talking to his son and describing his son’s burial. This notion is reinforced all throughout the poem when the tree is equalized with the son. Later in the poem, the speaker tries to keep himself busy taking care of something so that he can feel fulfilled as a father when he cannot truly fulfill his son’s prosperity. The fact that he is planting a sequoia tree is symbolic of this lack of prosperity, lack of future, for his son. They are not planting a tree to celebrate a new life for the “earth to bear,” but to mourn for the lost life of “a first-born son.” The speaker describes the tree-planting tradition of the Italians: “In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth— / An olive or a fig tree—a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. / I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard / A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, / A promise of new fruit in other autumns.” Since his son has died, however, the “promised fruit” will never come, and to display this mourning for his son’s death, the author doesn’t plant an olive tree or a fig tree, both of which are highly useful fruit bearing trees with great cultural importance. Instead, he “def[ies] the practical custom of our fathers” by planting a sequoia tree, a mammoth of a tree that lives for a very long time but does not produce useful fruits. Just like the tree, his son will not “bear fruit” throughout his life because he has died. In this sense, the tree serves both as a symbol for the death of the child, and as a beacon of hope that he will somehow be able to live forever.

This sense of everlasting life is expounded upon throughout the rest of the poem as well, in addition to several other time elements. The speaker hopes that the tree will live until after “our family is no more, all of [the child’s] unborn brothers dead,” and will someday be able to “stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, / silently keeping the secret of your birth.” Since his son cannot have a long, fruitful life in the regular sense of the word, he hopes that by planting this tree and infusing his son into the tree, the boy will be able to live long after the speaker and his immediate family is dead, the rest of the family “scattered,” the child’s “mother’s beauty ashes in the air,” because he thinks this will fulfill what could not be fulfilled because of the boy’s death. The extreme sense of sadness that the death of the child has created is further explained by describing the planting of the tree as being while “An old year [comes] to an end.” By describing the year as old, the speaker gives the reader a sense of how long time can seem when one is mourning the death of one’s child. This also creates empathy in the reader for the speaker because of his heart brokenness and sadness at losing a child. There are few things harder in a human’s life than losing and having to bury a child, and this can create a warped sense of time in the parent. The speaker speaks of traditions, going back many generations, when he tells of the tradition of planting an “olive or fig tree” whenever a child is born. He does so in order to describe the timeless importance of a first-born baby son. By telling of its importance, he creates an ever more tragic scene when he describes planting the tree and letting go of his son.

The writer utilizes fantastic diction and phrases throughout the poem to describe the feelings of the speaker about the death of his son. He describes the setting of the planting of the tree: “Rain blacked the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, / And the sky above us stayed the dull gray.” By using words like ‘cold,’ ‘blackened,’ and ‘dull gray,’ the writer creates a somber mood of sadness and darkness and cold. Standing in stark contrast to this in the next paragraph is the description of “a green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, / A promise of new fruit in other autumns.” In describing this scene of natural beauty, the speaker contrasts the normal feelings one has when their first-son is born with his current feelings of depression at the death of his first-born son. He goes on to describe another hopeful scene of “Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees” in order to describe his hope that the tree will live long and be prosperous in its own way and will live to see more hopeful days. Further reinforcing this is the fact that they plant the tree in a place “bathed in western light, / A slender shoot against the sunset.” This diction is much warmer and light than the telling of the present because the speaker has a great sense of hope that his son will love through this new tree and will be able to have some sort of life beyond his own death.

"planting a sequoia" by dana gidia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

-Dana Gidia

commentary on the aforementioned poem

In the poem “Passed On” by Carole Satymurti, the speaker tells a story almost as in a novel of their mother and how she left them a box of index cards with advice on life when she died. The speaker’s gender is never clearly stated. Parts of the poem make them seem male, others female. For purposes of this commentary, I will refer to them as “the speaker.” In the poem, the author presents the theme of growing up and becoming one’s own person through the maturation and acceptance process. They personify the index cards themselves, comparing them to the speaker’s mother. They also characterize the speaker and the speaker’s mother and create a mood of sadness and longing, implying that the mother has died and perhaps been dead for some time, but the speaker has never truly accepted this.

The title of the poem itself is a triple meaning that can be viewed in several different lights. On the one hand, the speaker seems to have grown up since their mother’s passing. As the speaker grows and matures, the cards their mother left them “seemed to shrink.” They would find parts of the cards “blank, the edges furred, mute, whole areas wrong, or missing.” There is a certain point in everyone’s life in which they realize that their parents are not infallible and make mistakes just like everyone else. Whereas earlier in the speaker’s life they felt like “the world was box-shaped,” that their mother had included everything in this box full of index cards, they have since had many new experiences that their mother had not anticipated. This feeling of growing up and becoming your own person may be the meaning of the title “Passed On.” The speaker has passed up their mother in terms of maturity and their mother can no longer teach them what they were able to before. The death of the mother itself may be the meaning of “Passed On.” The speaker tells of burning the index cards, stating, “the smoke rose thin and clear, slowly blurred.” This incendiary action recalls the age-old act of the funeral pyre. By burning the cards, the speaker is giving themselves closure in a symbolic funeral of sorts for her mother. Earlier, she states that her mother had “rendered herself down from flesh to paper” and she would “shuffle them to almost hear her speak.” The author personifies the speaker’s mother through these cards in order to give the reader a fuller idea of how much the cards meant to the speaker when they were younger and how symbolic an event it is to burn them on the beach. The funeral imagery is further reinforced by the speaker “creating a hollow cairn,” almost to act as a headstone for the cards, symbolically their mother’s, funeral spot. The final possible meaning of the title “Passed On” is the speaker’s own maturation. As they grew and started to doubt their mother’s wisdom, asking, “Had she known?” they have “Passed On” their mother’s advice because it is no longer pertinent to them. They have taken all they can from the cards and now can no longer see any real use for them.

The mother is characterized throughout the poem as a sickly woman but also a wise, foreseeing mother figure. The speaker is characterized at first as childish but eventually matures and moved past their immature ways into a wiser, world-wearier person. The speakers tells how they saw their mother’s “strength drain, ink-blue, from her finger-ends providing for a string of hard winters I was trying not to understand.” It is unclear what these “winters” refer to but I think they refer to the winters in which the speaker will have to survive without the mother’s guidance, in which she will have already died. She knows she is dying and wishes to impart everything she can to her daughter so they will not be completely lost when at last her heart does stop beating. The childishness of the speaker is presented by her “nagging” the mother and trying hard “not to understand” the winters that she knows she will eventually have to face. It is a very childish thing to do to see something and try to pretend it isn’t real just by forcing oneself not to understand it. It is hiding from the world and from the truth of the future and the speaker does it. The mother’s eventual deterioration is presented in the fourth stanza in a string of seemingly unrelated one to three word phrases. The speaker prefaces this by comparing their own notes to their mother’s “urgent dogmatism, loosening grip.” Their mother is seemingly slipping into the senseless world of senility and she shows it by writing in her index cards that she held in such high importance “infinitives never telling love lust single issue politics when don’t hopeless careful trust.” This obviously makes no sense and serves as a representation of the mother’s “loosening grip” on reality, her slow degradation into senility. This development in the mother is paralleled with the speaker’s own maturation. Adding “notes of my own” gives the speaker a newfound level of maturity; they feel experienced enough to alter the cards themselves. Enough time has passed for them to gain new experiences that they feel is worthy of being noted and they note them in these index cards. The speaker’s maturation process is ultimately completed in the symbolic burning of the cards. They have finally accepted their mother’s death and can survive without her. The speaker states, “Then I let her go.” Their maturation is finally complete; this is adulthood and the speaker has achieved it.

The general mood of the poem is quite sad. The author creates this mood by telling of the mother’s desperation to finish her project before she dies. She “rendered herself” from the flesh, making her “strength drain.” This is all of course being told through the speaker’s child and it is very sad to think of a young child having to witness this in their own parent at such a young age. When one is young, one thinks that one’s parents are supposed to be rocks of stability and strength and any hint of weakness is a truly sad thing to witness. The mood is furthered in phrased like “hard winters” and the speaker’s “doubt.” The speaker seems to dislike the fact that they were childish beforehand and could not relate to their mother while she was alive, but they can’t really change that. They finally accept the past and resolve to move on with their life, “let[ing her mother] go” through the burning of the index cards. This eventual tone of resolve is comes at a time in the speaker’s life when they feel they can finally move on.

This poem is truly a fantastic poem. The writer gives so much meaning and so many things to think about in such a short amount of space. It is truly incredible. The real measure of a poetic mind is how much a poet can say in how little space and Satyrmurti says very much with very little. The poem imparts a feeling to me that is hard to explain. It makes me step back and appreciate that I have those around me that I love so much, not just in my parents, but also in my friends and other family members. It has truly impacted me and thus was very successful. It imparted an experience that has changed the way I think and will forever be held in my heart.

passed on by carole satymurti

this is a poem i like a lot

Before, this box contained my mother.
For months she'd sent me out for index cards,
scribbled with a squirrel concentration
while I'd nag at her, seeing strength
drain, ink-blue, from her finger-ends
providing for a string of hard winters
I was trying hard not to understand.

Only after, opening it, I saw
how she'd rendered herself down from flesh
to paper, alphabetical; there for me
in every way she could anticipate
- Acupuncture: conditions suited to
- Books to read by age twenty-one
- Choux pastry: how to make, when to use.

The cards looked after me. I'd shuffle them
to almost hear her speak. Then, the world
was box-shaped (or was I playing safe?)
for every doubt or choice, a card that fitted
-Exams: the best revision strategy
-Flowers: cut, how to make them last
-Greece: the men, what you need to know.

BUt then they seemed to shrink. I'd turn them over,
find them blank, the edges furred, mute,
whole areas wrong, or missing. Had she known?
The language pointed to what wasn't said.
I'd add notes of my own, strange beside
her urgent dogmatism, loosening grip
- infinitives never telling love
lust single issue politics when
don't hopeless careful trust.

On the beach, I build a hollow cairn,
tipped in the cards. Then I let her go.
The smoke rose thin and clear, slowly blurred.
I've kept the box for diaries, like this.

some song i wrote that doesn't yet have a title

we'll sit in circles
in the grassy fields
and the wind will blow
and will make us feel
infinite like nothing can stop us now
the more we talk and learn the more it seems somehow
like we were all meant to be
here and now under this tree
the leaves will blow in circles sweet
and the more i learn about you the more i see

that all i want is for us to just sit and play
and talk and dance and prance around all day

we have all just left our homes
and now we have a chance for us grow
and start to see what life really is for us for
the more i learn about what i adore

i see that all i want for us is to sit and play
and talk and dance and prance around all day
we'll sing duets about the lives we have had
the lives that seem to all have left us passed

i see you watch me from under that tree
and the way you see me endlessly makes you seem
like someone who was just made to be
here with me and all we see

all those around us that make us feel
like we belong like what we have to deal
with every day is not that hard
i love them all all they impart