Continuing to put Malcolm Guite's beautiful songs on YouTube with photographs.
His songs are so full of images, it seems a real challenge.
But I do what I did with some of his poems before, I just listen to the feelings that those images summon up for me and then choose photographs in what I have. Sometimes I will take a picture specifically or make a composite picture but I try to not make it too busy so the beauty of the song remains central.

Sing a song of sowing
Carrying the seed
A song of hopeful planting
To meet a future need
Sing a song of letting go
And falling to the ground
Of burying that feels like loss
Still waiting to be found

There are no songs of famine
Hunger has no voice
The poor must scavenge what they can
While the rich are spoiled for choice
The stones of fear and anger
Will strike you from behind
Hunger hates the stranger
And cleaves to his own kind

Sing a song of exile
Loneliness and loss
A song of broken bridges
Nobody can cross
A song of desperation
For a word you can understand
A song of fearful labour
On someone else’s land

Then sing a song of marriage
The grace of bride and groom
The fruitful vine around the door
Joy within the room
A song of love and longing
For the children yet to be
A quiver-full of future hopes
Aimed at eternity

Sing a song of mourning
The shadows and the tombs
The bitterness of broken hearts
And disappointed wombs
Sing a song of empty words
And unexpressed despair
Of reaching out at midnight
For the one who isn’t there

Sing a song of waiting
Weeping on the earth
A song of expectation
Longing for new birth
Sing a song of patience
Of watching through the night
Sing those hours before the dawn
Then sing the coming light

Sing a song of harvest
Of one who bind the sheaves
And one who gleans along the edge
The good another leaves
Sing a song of winnowing
And taking into store
Of Barley heaped like glowing gold
All on the threshing floor

Sing out before the Lord of Life
Your songs of joy and pain
Sing of the years the locusts ate
That cannot come again
Sing to Him your hopes and fears
Your tales of right and wrong
And He will make your voice a part
Of His Redemption Song

©Malcolm Guite 2011
From the album "Dancing through the fire"
Cambridge Riffs Records
www.cambridgeriffs.co.uk/records

PHOTOGRAPHS
©Margot Krebs Neale
www.margot-krebs-neale.co.uk