Will Be Tomorrow

• Composer: Ada Palmer
• Format: Three parts

Here the lyrics flow back and forth between the different voices, so the dominant line converses with itself. This recording is from 2001; the lyrics for the second and third verses were re-written with Jo Walton in 2014.

Composer’s Comment: The most fun but also most difficult sections are the very complicated “hey, hey, hey” bridge lines which fall between the verses.  When the group was first learning them we nicknamed the first set the “possible heys” and the second the “impossible heys”.  But it’s worth it when they come out right.

Lyrics:

The moments mount to minutes,
mount to hours, mount to days.
They ceaseless come and ceaseless go
And ceaselessly amaze.

Just think of what I did today,
Beneath the single sun:
The triumphs I have filed away,
The journeys I’ve begun.
I stretched my limbs and travelled somewhere,
Savored joys and challenged dangers,
Saw the sun and tasted air,
Laughed with friends and talked to strangers.
While I’m living life this way
The water may as well be wine,
I revel so in every day
And savor every ounce of time.
Beginnings are a world to employ,
Every task a game to play through,
And endings give me only joy,
Since I know

Tomorrow is another day,
Another life to lead my way.
As sleeping hours drift away
I’ll dream of what will be today,

The moments mount past human scale
From seconds to millennia.
I strive, but whether win or fail
It’s unremembered anyhow.

I want to live for centuries
And make new things in every one,
To reach, to grow, to feel the breeze,
And walk beneath each distant sun.
I want to study everything,
In joyful curiosity:
New people I’m discovering
And aliens I long to see.
I’d make this good world better yet,
And share the best that I can do.
I’ll view the past without regret,
Preserve the old, embrace the new.
Each moment an increasing scope here
Creating and conversing still,
That is the heart of all my hope
Since I know…

Tomorrow is another day.
Another life to lead my way,
As sleeping hours drift away
I’ll dream of what will be today.

The moments mount to hours,
Mount to lifetimes mount to years.
The past is faded flowers
As the future becomes fears.

The end of the parenthesis,
Closed in like a November night,
This measured thread is all there is
And any moment die I might,
Or worse, lose what I want to say
And pieces of my memory
Declining into slow decay
Till all my dreams are lost to me.
Now while I live and hope and breathe,
Though harpies circle Pegasus,
I’ll fight to build what I believe
A future to be dear to us.
When my today has no tomorrows,
I’ll plant a tree for those ahead here,
Grasp my joy despite my sorrows,
And remember…

Tomorrow is another day…