A House for the Goddess by Annelinde Metzner

For the past few years I’ve been contributing to FAR as a poet.  So grateful for the opportunity to connect with you wise women!  This month I realize I should share with you another side of me, my music.

      On June 8th, I produced, directed and composed the music for “A House for the Goddess” in Asheville, North Carolina, featuring 29 performers including two sopranos, a cellist, myself and another pianist, two dancers, an MC and a women’s choir.  The concert, whose venue was offered generously by Land of the Sky United Church of Christ, was a sellout, and over three thousand dollars was raised for the Linda Norgrove Foundation for the women and children of Afghanistan (https://lindanorgrovefoundation.org.)

      My compositions, both choral pieces and solo art songs, always find their birth through the inspiration of poetry.  At this venue, the texts of the poetry were displayed on two screens overhead as the songs were sung.

    I decided right out of the gate to “throw down” my intention and lifelong mission to honor the Goddess with my art.  Our first song, performed by soprano Alison Tynes Adams with myself at the piano, was my setting of “I Built a House for the Goddess” from Patricia Monaghan’s Goddess Companion. This book of daily readings is a treasure trove of short, pithy texts, this one from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, devoted to Hathor.

Alison and I, who had been rehearsing weekly for months, quickly realized the vast number of connections being made among songs and media in the show.  For example, Leah Robling in the above photo is embodying Hathor.  Behind her is a staff from a sycamore tree which Leah had made and treasured, which she found also in the lyrics of the song.

    “I built a house for the Goddess, made of the wood, of the wood of the sycamore tree!” 

     Many of my poems have explored the significance of the ancient Sycamore Fig, which I believe represented the goddess Asherah in the Old Testament. In the photo below, Hathor is embodied in the sacred Sycamore.

      A group of four songs from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of the Hours was translated from the German by me and performed by Alison and Frances Duff on the cello, with myself at the piano.  In “The Vineyard’s Guardian,” Rilke envisions the Divine this way:

“You’re like a fig tree rooted in marble-hard ground that bears a hundred figs. Fragrance pours from Your verdant limbs.”

Settings of poems from Diane DiPrima’s epic volume, Loba, from my own poetry (“I Am a Field of Grass”) and from Rilke’s Song of the Hours were interspersed with more chant-like, rhythmic praise songs from my songbook, “Lady of Ten Thousand Names,” including 2 frame drummers, inspired by the work of Layne Redmond (When the Drummers Were Women) who was an Asheville resident until her passing in 2013. Here is a photo of Sahara Peace Choir performing “Inanna, High Priestess” with Maggie Moon embodying Her through dance.

It seemed evident to me that the finale for this production should be “We Have a Beautiful Mother,” from Alice Walker’s Her Blue Body Everything We Know. This is an ecstatic love poem to Mother Gaia, full of vivid metaphor.

“We have a beautiful mother. Her hills are buffaloes, Her buffaloes hills. We have a beautiful mother. Her oceans are wombs, Her wombs oceans.”

I composed this as a duet including Alison and soprano Kimberly Hughes, ending with a coda joined by the choir, and including the two dancers.  I am filled with gratitude to Alice Walker, Christina Pacosz, Diane DiPrima and all the poets, ancient and recent, who set forth their praises of the Goddess, and who have inspired me and helped to make this concert a reality.

        The concert was videoed, and individual songs can be seen on my Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/annelindemetzner.