It’s a real honor when one of your own creations brings someone else a moment of reflection or inspiration. I am especially humbled to have been able to perform in the world-premiere performances recently of composer Michael Rene Torres’ new work in the never-ending shore of your tomorrows, inspired by my poem “The Never-ending Shore.”

Michael composed his new work on commission for the acclaimed Carpe Diem String Quartet, as part of their 15 for 15 Commissioning Project, celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the quartet’s founding.

Michael’s in the never-ending shore of your tomorrows is a profound and powerful work very much in the lineage of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings.

Like those works, Michael’s is elegiac and soulful. Michael reached right into the heart of my poem, itself a meditation on death and transcendence into nature, and created a contemplative musical space at once within and beyond time.

Here, I introduce one of the Carpe Diem String Quartet’s world-premiere performances of Michael Rene Torres’
in the never-ending shore of your tomorrows with a reading of my poem “The Never-ending Shore:”

It is my hope that Michael will arrange his piece for string orchestra, just as Samuel Barber and George Walker arranged their elegiac quartet gems for the warm sounds of the string orchestra. This work deserves to be performed and heard widely. It is music that, in a fractured and in all-too-inhuman world, gives listeners permission to sit quietly, to feel, and to be fully human.