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Visitors

from Visitors by Howard Simon

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Also a new song written in 2015. My father-in-law Dr. Jacob Igra passed away on January 2 of that year. He was, quietly and simply, a great man. “Visitors” is a small song of consolation for the family. The lyrics are in interweaved quatrains called Rubaiyat stanzas, a structure that repeats the rhyme scheme aaba with the third line of each stanza forming the dominant rhyme for the next: aaba/bbcb/ccdc, etc. The form (Persian in origin) was first used in English by Edward Fitzgerald in “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” but I learned it from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” his famous meditation on death that very much influenced this song. I am grateful to co-writer (and bassist extraordinaire) Cary Black for helping me complete the music to these words.

lyrics

Visitors

In the cool of the evening, watching you grieve
Wiping your face with the side of your sleeve
When the vigil was over all that remained
Was a white linen shroud that you could not unweave

When something is lost, they say something is gained
When one soul departs, another’s unchained
But these aren’t the chords of comfort you crave
Or words that make clear what cannot be explained

The lives that we lose, the lives we can’t save
The voices that whisper and sing from the grave
They visit us often in daylight and dreams
With memory and love, the gifts that they gave

The river that flows through the crags and the seams
Gathers its strength from a thousand small streams
And we are no more than the sum of our past
Each life is a life that renews and redeems

And we will be more than the sum of our past
Each life is a life that will not be the last

credits

from Visitors, released June 27, 2016

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Howard Simon San Francisco, California

I am a San Francisco-based singer-songwriter. My songs are about love (romantic and otherwise), family, morality and mortality. If there is a common thread to my songs, it is the people we love, the desire to do right, and the hope and fear, the peace and the struggle that constitute life bring wonder in addition to its joy and sadness, and sometimes loss. ... more

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