Sounders of the Depths is Emma Talbot’s exhibition at GEM in The Hague (next to the Photography and Kunstmuseum). It features brilliant, visceral installations (photocollage of selected works above). The show’s soundtrack, serendipitously, is a recording of Hurrian Hymn 6, the earliest piece of transcribed music (c. 1400 BC) – and it’s serendipitous because I wrote this haiku chain about it, some of whose preoccpuations resonate with Talbot’s work:

hurrian hymn

as we humans sing

for the goddess of the moon

singing creates us

*

now we come alive

in a forgotten language

past and unsurpassed

*

words from long ages

of birth, death and love relived

make us only us

*

being an offering –

the oldest song in the world

written in our blood

*

printed on this clay

by god through genes of humans

words and melodies

*

our voices swelling

the endlessly singing silence

breath of timeless sound

*

thirty three centuries

in a blind eye’s blink – always

we sing of presence

*

always we are song

mostly so when discomposed

in discord suffering

*

we’re never to be

silenced or wiped out as we

sing ourselves alive

*

**

*

omm